A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, the saying goes. The same is true of misinformation. We head into our third year of the global pandemic, in part, because of cocksure freedomistas who refuse vaccination because they’ve heard COVID-19 has a roughly 2% mortality rate. They are not like the “sheep” threatened by that, no sir. But they are super-side-eye concerned about taking a vaccine with a 0.0022% mortality rate. And about wearing masks. And screw you for accepting a minor inconvenience to protect your neighbors.
That attitude has consequences.
This alarming post from @travelingnurse grabbed my attention Tuesday. In a big way.
You or someone you know could die at home because there is no bed for you at hospitals filled to overflowing with unvaccinated Covid patients. The world is bigger than the free exercise of your right to be a jerk. But that truth might not come home to vaccine refuseniks until they or a family member has a stroke, a heart attack, or a car accident.
The Washington Post front-pages this threat:
Health officials’ recommendation this week to shorten the isolation period for people with asymptomatic coronavirus infections to five days was driven largely by the concern that essential services might be hobbled amid one of the worst infection surges of the pandemic, said senior officials familiar with the discussions.
Even though the highly transmissible omicron varient has milder symptoms than other strains, high case levels could drive up absenteeism among “thousands of police, firefighters, grocery workers and other essential employees.”
Another Post front-page story reinforces @travelingnurse’s tale.
Iowan Dale Weeks developed a case of sepsis requiring hospitalization last month:
But at a time when unvaccinated covid-19 patients have again overwhelmed hospitals because of the fast-spreading omicron variant, finding an available bed at a large medical center able to give him the treatment he needed proved to be difficult. Weeks was being treated at a small, rural hospital. He had waited 15 days to be transferred to a larger hospital with better treatment options, because facilities throughout Iowa did not have an open bed for him as a result of the latest hospital surge of unvaccinated patients, his children told The Washington Post.
“It was terribly frustrating being told, ‘There’s not a bed yet,’ ” Jenifer Owenson, one of his four children, said Tuesday. “All of us were talking multiple times a day, ‘Why can’t we get him a bed?’ There was this logjam to get him in anywhere.”
When Weeks was finally able to have surgery more than two weeks later, his condition from sepsis had worsened. Weeks died Nov. 28 of complications after surgery. He was 78.
Owenson added, “The thing that bothers me the most is people’s selfish decision not to get vaccinated and the failure to see how this affects a greater group of people. That’s the part that’s really difficult to swallow.” Local hospitals are overwhelmed with unvaccinated patients.
This story is from last week (Business Insider 12/20):
There is not enough room for all the sick and injured people in Minnesota to receive the emergency care they need.
Hundreds are waiting, some on the floor, in hopes that a bed or operating table might open up. On Tuesday morning, 246 patients statewide had been waiting for more than four hours for a bed.
It’s a backlog created by yet another surge of COVID-19 cases. Doctors and nurses say there’s no end in sight, and people are likely dying in the shadows of this wave of infections.
Every time it seems the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter, it recedes.