Translating the numbers. COVID. What do extra beds mean.
It’s another pet peeve I have with media and government bodies, whenever they go, we have X number of extra beds or we can flex up to this many beds.
It does not mean the beds come out of thin air. Or that COVID staff have magically appeared as “extra staffing” in addition to regular hospital beds.
It’s just not how it works. even if you have extra physical rooms and beds, training staff takes years.
It means regular hospital beds are being converted and staff are being transferred from whatever departments they were previously in to staff the COVID wards.
They could be surgeons, anaesthetists, physicians etc. trained to do other jobs, now being re-purposed or re-trained to temporarily staff ICU or COVID wards.
It means, less timely care and beds for other diseases that while not life threatening, are no less significant. No one casually goes to hospital for a cold for instance. Even those really sick with COVID needing hospital admission, are in terrible shape, it’s not like a bad case of the “man flu.”
I’ve seen entire public hospitals re-purposed to cater solely to COVID and it means other patients get re-diverted elsewhere where staff may not know long term patients with complex conditions or staff are not used to caring for some of them. This can lead to higher medical errors or worse long term outcomes than normal. For example, we have expert units in Cystic Fibrosis, organ transplants etc., not all hospitals or generalists are going to be as highly skilled in looking after them. Entire stroke wards have been dissolved or amalgamated with internal medicine units, so some staff can be re-purposed for COVID. There is no one size fits all in medicine, not all the time.
Healthcare agencies have already come out halted elective surgeries. This is needed during a crisis, but what are elective surgeries? Why is this term being thrown around? These aren’t superfluous necessarily, like a tummy tuck or hernia repair. Elective can refer to surgery to determine if someone has the early stages of cancer. We are going to see an influx of advanced cancers which means, higher mortality, more destructive therapies to control it versus the very early stage. And this isn’t solely limited to cancer, it’s also relevant to a host of other chronic diseases. We really take for granted the care we were providing previously. And we’re going backwards in the care we provide by years, possibly decades. I can’t imagine what this means for developing countries already under resourced and behind.
My other pet peeve is when politicians in particular and journalists, come out and go, we’ve known for 18 months or 2 years blah blah why were we not better prepared for the 3rd, 4th, 5th peak? It can take 10 years + to train a doctor. Med school can be 4-6 years depending on where you are in the world. Then you add residency etc. Nurses also need years to adequately train. We can’t just pull doctors out of a hat or from other countries - it’s a global pandemic.
Our healthcare systems were already operating at capacity before the pandemic. Why on earth would anyone think it would magically meet the challenge of the pandemic without repercussions? Where do you think the extra beds come from?
I wish the media would stop reporting extra beds as something we just pulled out of thin air when we didn’t. It’s providing a false sense of security and relief. Right now, we need to continue to encourage vaccinations and appropriate pandemic restriction measures, whatever they may be.
y’all are mad that “MoM ignored wanda’s character development from wandavision and mischaracterized her”, even though the post credit scene in wandavision had her using the darkhold and it is explained both there and in MoM how extremely corrupting that can be??? the way she acts is 100% in character imo, she is literally being controlled. the darkhold is using her loss and grief as a weakness against her.
also— is fun still allowed?? because idk about you all but watching badass creepy and super powerful wanda being the villain was the most fun i’ve had at the cinema in a really long time
