At this point it’s really all about hospital capacity as more people are getting sick and being admitted to hospitals, approaching the high point set a year ago. When all the hospitals in an area are filled to capacity, not only will more people die due to Covid but more people die due to other causes as they can’t get the treatment they need.

This was brought home to me a year ago when my mother suffered a pulmonary embolism and was rushed to the hospital where she needed to be put on a ventilator. Had our region been overloaded with Covid patients, as was the case in other parts of the state and country at the time, my mother wouldn’t have gotten the necessary treatment to have survived.

@p-nullifidian Yes, actual Covid deaths are about 40% higher than the official death toll because of deaths like this,

Our newest troll on this site. Welcome the vaccine reluctant Covid denier @puff

@p-nullifidian In Oz, our services are affected to with empty shelves in supermarkets starting to happen, but our hospitals are nowhere near being overwhelmed. In response, the govt has now mandated close contacts only need to self isolate for 5 days now to free up some of the absent workforce. Used to be 7, or 10, maybe 14 days self isolation.
Glad to hear your Mum got the treatment she needed.

@puff The land of Oz sounds better off than the United States!

I received word that my uncle passed away this morning from Covid - pneumonia. When admitted to the hospital in Vancouver, Washington, they had no ICU or critical care beds left, so he was put in a standard room without a ventilator and allowed to pass with plenty of morphine to ease his suffering. He was an old man who refused the vaccine, and he made his choice. But the fact that the hospital couldn’t even place him in an ICU ward if they wanted to is an example of what I’m talking about here. The virus is in charge, and the numbers don’t lie.

@p-nullifidian Wrap your head around this one, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
It was mandated that all medical workers must be vaccinated by December with those opting out being sacked. I just visited a nursing home and had a chin wag with the Manager. She said they are short staffed because they lost some from refusing to be vaxxed and others who are deemed close contacts and are isolating. Quite a few nursing homes in Queensland are now already locked down.
Then she said this morning a new directive from above came through. Those testing positive are now allowed to work again but must PPE up. Meanwhile, there is an unvaccinated work pool waiting to be tapped.

Sorry, but what the fuck is going on here and who are the fuckwits making these decisions?
Not a lot of time for "medical experts" making decisions regarding controls put in place to keep us all "safe".

Neither are current medicines available.
Perhaps we need to learn to live with it, rather than "defeat"? If we do learn to live with it then for all practicality, we have defeated it by keeping it under control.

@puff More people die of Covid every week in America than have died in China TOTAL. America's response to Covid is a spectacular fail by any standards.

@Druvius Don't even bother. The guy's just an asshole.

@Druvius The Scandinavian countries seem to have handled it better than most. India and Japan adopted a "treat as soon as testing positive approach", that seems somewhat successful also. Can't really trust figures coming out of China, which is still chasing elimination which Australia thankfully abandoned. The peak we are now seeing here, about 30,000 new infections tested/ day (11 deaths yesterday I think) and rising in NSW alone, is a combination of Omicron transmitting like a mother plus no-one here has been exposed to the virus yet, our 2 years of isolation delaying the inevitable.
The idea was to vaccinate all then open up, which they have excepting WA and the NT. I feel it is more luck than anything it has timed well with the omicron variant, which seems to affect upper respiratory system only. If we opened up with Delta kicking around, hospitalisation figures would be far worse. Sure, the vaccines may take some credit for our hospital figures being low, but this strain is sure helping.
Hopefully, we will mimic Sth Africa which also saw huge rises in infection rates that peaked and dropped quickly. I think the US will also do that as omicron dominates over other strains.
It will be a quick, "fun" month I think then hopefully some normality follows.