Labor Day Is No Holiday For Frontline Healthcare Workers
This week’s Courier Herald column:
As we approach our second Labor Day of this pandemic we’re in a different yet familiar place as last year. One year ago we had begun to tentatively re-open parts of the country. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” had morphed into something much different.
And yet, after a mid-summer spike in Covid cases, the trends were positive this time last year. While the vaccines that have provided both protection and peace of mind to many were not yet available, case counts and hospitalizations were declining rapidly.
We kept winning, until late October. We then saw a new spike in Covid cases that peaked just after the new year began. That peak was roughly double the case count from the summer of 2020. We’re back to that level of hospitalized Covid cases now, with the numbers still rising.
What is different now is that we now know it didn’t have to be this way. The vast majority of hospitalized individuals declined to be vaccinated. This is putting a very real strain on our medical system, which has effects well beyond patients with Covid.
A notice from Georgia’s Department of Public Health last week noted that almost every Atlanta area hospital was on “diversion”. This means that ambulances are asked to seek other hospitals when possible as the Emergency room on diversion status is too busy to handle additional patients.
It’s not just an Atlanta problem. Statewide, 88% of all hospital beds are in use. 94% of all ICU beds have patients.
What happens when all the hospitals ask that ambulances take their patients elsewhere? It’s mostly a lesson on why Economics is the dismal science. Our politicians have created trillions of dollars to throw at this and many other problems over the past 18 months. What they haven’t done is solve the problem of scarcity.
We’re all aware of the shortage of both goods and workers. Shoppers with money in hand can’t find cars on dealer lots to purchase. Many restaurants have curtailed hours or have even begun to close one or more days per week due to staffing shortages. The reasons extend beyond economic assistance that has been criticized as a disincentive to work.
Older workers are rightfully concerned about increasing their exposure to the public. Many parents have been forced to stay at home to monitor their children, whose schools continue to close for in-person instruction.
All industries have experienced a reduction in the number of people willing and available to work. This hits professions that require specific skills and training the hardest, which brings us back to the hospitals that are full.
Our hospital workers, EMT’s, and first responders are tired. They’ve been fighting this battle on the front lines – risking their own personal health – for a year and a half. They too are short staffed.
Because the surge in Covid cases is nationwide, there are no other workers to bring to Georgia to treat our Covid or non-Covid patients. The system is operating at or beyond maximum capacity. We’re literally out of healthcare professionals to treat additional patients.
Only about 1/3 of current patients are hospitalized due to Covid. Every additional patient that ends up in an ER or ICU due to Covid is competing for resources that would otherwise be used to treat a patient having a heart attack, stroke, or who had been injured in an accident.
We can’t, in real time, create more skilled healthcare workers. We’re now at the point of asking them to ration healthcare to decide who gets treated, and who does not.
That’s not what they signed up for. On this Labor Day, think of their labor, and what it has meant to you and your family in times of need.
If you’ve ever experienced the kindness of a nurse, the healing of a physician, or the immediate response to an emergency from a 911 call, then you know how badly we need every one of these people on the job.
Labor Day won’t be a holiday for them. Many are missing their regular days off. Too many are quitting due to the stress, which is very real and shows no signs of letting up.
If you’re currently unvaccinated, please – please reconsider making an appointment to get a shot. Get out of the mindset of politics. Instead, think about the workers and the hospital beds we need to treat every day illnesses and emergencies. Getting vaccinated is the best way to thank these people for their own effort and sacrifices over the last year and a half.
About Author
Charlie
Founder of GeorgiaPol.com; Now weekly columnist Very interested in Georgia and Georginas. Interest in politics is waning daily.
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The time for hospitals, especially hide nearing or at capacity, to refuse the unvaccinated is long overdue. They’ve made a choice based on political or other knucklehead reasons and must live (or die) with the consequences.
I am as frustrated as anyone when it comes to folks refusing the Covid vaccine. That is no reason to bar someone from going to the ER or Urgent Care due to respiratory distress or severe symptoms.
You might as well put smokers, folks who drink alcohol, bad drivers, etc on that list as well.
And how would you separate the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated? Apply a tattoo once someone gets the second shot?
Unfortunately, our failed system, which includes the closure of several unprofitable rural hospitals in GA in recent years, has created a situation where tough choices must be made as hospitals near or are at capacity. Covid anti-vaxers tout rugged individualism and made their choice. Can’t have it both ways, though I am saddened by these senseless deaths that could’ve been easily prevented.
You’re creating a false equivalence between Covid anti-vaxers and these others. Proof of vaccination was provided in the form of a card.
It is still the law that you cannot refuse to treat someone in an emergency. A medical facility still has to stabilize the patient.
“You’re creating a false equivalence between Covid anti-vaxers and these others.” All of those scenarios are still a result of choice.
There’s only so many ICU beds available. Due to the USA’s profit-driven system and failed covid response, we’re now in triage mode. If 1 ICU bed is left, should it go to an anti-vaxxer sick with COVID or a vaccinated person in life threatening condition?
Receiving a vaccination is so easy and costs nothing for those who qualify, why I struggle to emphasize with these folks. But your point about choice is interesting and further illustrates the hypocrisy and childishness of libertarian mindsets who depend on public services. To your point, as we go down the triage priority list, if beds are full, should vaccinated smokers be turned away for vaccinated non-smokers?
Of course, examining root causes, if USA healthcare was based on care and prevention instead of profits we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. Enough beds would be available for those who do right and the knuckleheads who suddenly care about the public good when their life or the life of somebody in their circle is on the line.
After a year and a half of this stuff, I am physically weary from the realization of how close to a real-life version of “idiocracy” we have drifted. I have 2 siblings born in the late 40’s and early 50’s, when the dread of the perennial summer outbreaks of polio was still very much a thing. The worst outbreak in U.S. history was in 1952, with over 50,000 cases and over 3,000 deaths (adjusting for current pop, a little over 2X of each figure). Please note those figures.
Each summer, outbreaks would lead to entire communities quarantining and families taking long secluded vacations trying to avoid infection. Insurance companies offered “polio insurance” for infants, although the bulk of infections had shifted from newborns/infants to school-aged children and young adults. In towns with outbreaks, Summer sports would be cancelled, pools closed, theatres would suspend showings, etc. Oh, the horror.
Early trials of polio vaccines had major problems, leading to disease and deaths in children. The Salk vaccine…which had trials on nearly 2M children…was found to be truly effective and began widespread distribution, although the virus in a large batch produced in 1955 in a west coast facility wasn’t properly ‘inactivated’…leading to over 200,000 receiving active virus. It was believed this incident resulted in 40K cases of polio leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.
Sabin’s oral vaccine (drops on a sugar cube) with a weakened (“attenuated”) virus….mainly tested/trialed in Russia….ended up mostly replacing Salk’s formaldehyde-deactivated injection, although there were still small numbers of infections found to be caused by it over the next couple of decades.
The key point to be taken from this is that…even with “only” a couple of thousand deaths in the “bad” years and isolated vaccine issues…there certainly wasn’t the level of hesitancy in the U.S. population in getting their children vaccinated. I mean…nearly 2M American children were offered up on the “trail altar” for Salk’s vaccine, and once widespread distribution began practically every elementary school in the country had multiple clinics offering the shots to all eligible children. In April 1955, the team holding one such clinic at a New Mexico school second-guessed their offerings of ice cream and candy afterwards, as at least two children went thru the line twice to get a second ice cream cone…and shot.
Maybe it was the spectre of the images of children in iron lungs…or maybe simply the fact that it was primarily children infected/paralyzed/dying. If COVID had been one of the SARS that impacted children more readily rather than the older and less-healthy segments (pre-Delta, anyway) would we have this level of hesitancy, politics-driven theories aside?
Maybe too many people have simply never seen what a truncated life spent in an iron lung looks like.
I wonder why.