Divemedic shared a link from The Guardian that says: Covid-19: nursing homes account for ‘staggering’ share of US deaths, data show.
In the article, we find a link to the Keiser Family Foundation with Wuhan Virus data and how it has affected the US. Among that data, I found this:
About the only certain thing we knew about the Wuhan virus from very early was its predilection for the elderly and the sick. Lack of preparation seems to be the norm for certain states which also include some basic bonehead moves that possibly helped with their body count.
Once this Wuhan V crap is “over”, I believe we are gonna be shocked about the amount of wasted time, money & resources we had. Just because some people in the “expert” side of things felt they needed to exercise their temporary powers.
Was a quarantine necessary? I am going to go with YES but only for about 2 weeks till we had a better picture of who was the most likely victim pool. After that, we could have gone back to “normal with adjustments” meaning we make sure the seniors and the sick were properly cared for. Economically and socially it would have been a shock, but not the disaster we are seeing right now.
And we have no idea what will be the health cost of those who were not able to go to a doctor or hospital because we shut down the health system to basically deal with one thing.
And we better learn fast because Flu season is coming.
Will we learn?
No.
This is just lesson number, oh, I lost count. How many times have we seen government fail, and then they simply ignore it, pat themselves on the back, and double down?
“We” (the collective we) won’t learn anything. If we ever learned anything at all, we would elect leaders dedicated to downsizing and deregulating. And hold them to it, turning them out at the first sign of being co-opted by the permanent professional government.
But we won’t do that. We don’t pay enough attention, or worse: we see government as something to do something for us or as “uncle sugar.”
Government officials will not learn anything. Government officials fail upward. As always, government protects itself first.
For the most part, they don’t really give a damn about you. They pretend to, in order to gain a position of authority and power. But at the end of the day, they care about themselves first.
See Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
The best we can do is keep our heads down, be able to fend for ourselves as best we can, and interact with the State as little as possible.
I assume that they are lumping “nursing homes” and “assisted living facilities” together here. The residents in nursing homes typically need a higher level of personal care than those in assisted living facilities. However, people would not be in either type of facility if they didn’t have one or more physical or mental ailments that prevents them from taking care of themselves on a day-to-day basis. This puts them at an elevated risk for the Wuhan-virus causing severe symptoms. Add in the fact that the population of these facilities is usually well over the age of 70 and you you have a near ideal Petri dish for severe cases of the Wu-V. Couple these facts with the fact that some governors are ordering positive Wu-V patients back to nursing homes and you have a recipe for disaster. These facilities are not hospitals nor are they equipped or staffed to handle a contagious disease.
Honestly, I am pretty sure that a full stay at home, close the shops/restaurants order was needed at all in most places. Increased precautions against viral spread would probably have kept the infection rate well within the limits of the healthcare system. Those at high risk should take their own precautions.
I would be curios to see, after all this is done, how many (estimated statistically) people were infected/sick/died from this virus before the first “official” case was found in WA state. I have a feeling the virus was out there, and well spread throughout the population. As I have noted in earlier posts, there are(were) three/four flights a week direct from Wuhan to both NYC and San Fran. These flights continued for months after the virus was id’ed, and before we saw our first case in the US. If the virus was not already running rampant through both those cities by late Jan, that would make it damned near impossible to catch.
Either way, the “hunkering down” likely provided little to no benefit for most areas.
Was a quarantine necessary?
All indications are no, it did nothing. There’s at least three papers I’m aware of, one by a mathematician not an MD, that demonstrate the growth curves in the number of infected people is statistically the same regardless of quarantine.
The most important attributes related to survival are found to be (1) being metabolically healthy and (2) (slightly surprisingly) normal vitamin D levels. The correlation to the death rate going up with age is that about 80% of the elderly are not metabolically healthy. The spurious numbers of younger people are largely due to some underlying condition nobody knew about.
As one doctor pointed out, a metabolically healthy 80 year old is more likely to survive than a 60 year old diabetic.
Everybody’s Nope. Target age and medical restrictions? Let’s say yes, no need to be mandatory because at that age people have a good idea about dying and they don’t want it.
but we are Monday Morning quarterbacking to a point.
It’s Monday Morning quarterbacking if the people you’re analyzing are in good faith. It’s exposing malfeasance if they aren’t. Given what you’ve seen from the likes of Cuomo, which would you say applies here?