An up-close look at a hospital breaking under the Omicron load


This opinion piece in WaPo today provides a horrifying perspective by an ER doctor on the situation in her ER on a “typical” day of the omicron wave. It shows very clearly that lack of beds is just the beginning of the problem. The lack of staff at all levels – EMTs through nurses through physicians – is really hurting, but even worse, it’s leading to more burnout among the existing staff, which of course is making the staffing shortage worse, which of course is increasing burnout…lather, rinse, repeat.

I have two ideas for Joe Biden:

First, turn Build Back Better into another Covid relief bill, this one focused entirely on building back the hospital staff (and infrastructure, although that’s not the main problem) that we need to handle what – as the author points out – will undoubtedly be an overload of the system for a long time to come. This is both because we’re almost certainly not finished with Covid, even when the omicron wave subsides, but because there is a big backlog of people with other problems who haven’t come to the hospital, either because there were no beds or because they were afraid of catching Covid. And of course, the staffing shortages have made it much worse.

Second, include in that bill a requirement for every eligible person in the US to be vaccinated, period (and maybe it should be backed by fines that go to support hospital staffing). Yes, it will meet a lot of opposition and it might not pass, but at least it will make it very clear who is standing in the way of a Covid recovery. We wouldn’t have anywhere near the current problems if we didn’t have so much opposition to vaccination. If we’re going to be stuck with Covid for a long time, with a continually-overwhelmed-and-understaffed healthcare system, at least we’ll know who to blame if the GOP kills the bill with a filibuster.

But given that the people most hurt by killing the bill will be unvaccinated Republicans (many of whom will literally be killed), it’s very possible this one will pass!

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

Comments

  1. Susan StairJanuary 22, 2022 at 7:42 AM

    Thank you Tom, this is an excellent solution for this complex mess.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tom AlrichJanuary 22, 2022 at 8:17 AM

    Thank you, sister! I really like the idea of putting a bill out there to solve the hospital staffing crisis, and daring McConnell to filibuster that. I'd much rather see the bill pass, but if it fails, the Dems will certainly win that one.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more

The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...
Read more

More than ever, we’re on our own

Leana Wen, a physician and former public health commissioner for Baltimore, wrote another great op-ed piece for the Post today entitled “We’ve reached 200,000 deaths. Our response has gotten even worse than it was at 100,000.” It makes the stark point: By the most important measures of public health, we’re doing worse on a national scale than we were in late May, when the US passed 100,000 Covid deaths. Here are some of her points: “In late May, we had about 20,000 new infections per day. Now we are at double that, with  around 40,000  new daily infections. This is a high baseline to have entering the fall and winter, when the combination of quarantine fatigue and cold weather could drive people to congregate indoors and substantially increase transmission.” “In addition, restrictions keep getting lifted, even in states with surging infections. The nearly 2  million  students returning for in-person instruction will surely lead to more outbreaks, as some colleg...
Read more