Originally Posted by
Capn Rex Havoc
Grumpy Retiree and DeFlieger - Give your vast ICU credentials to this forum.
I am working alongside the medical professionals, and they do not assess vaccination status when treating cases. If a patient is has covid like symptoms they will treat said patient as having covid until PCR tests can confirm otherwise.
Gladly. Zero. No medical training beyond my basic company first aid stuff. But I listen to my relatives and friends who do have medical degrees, and who are doctors who do work in the hospitals. What you've said there though is correct, and goes some way to illustrating the problem - people come in and need to be isolated and tested, adding to the workload. And when some of them get those tests and a positive case is confirmed, it takes out a bunch of medical professionals while they self-isolate or are treated, reducing available staffing levels at a time of increased workload and disrupting the surgical and other programs as the people who should be running them, are in isolation. That has a human cost, in terms of worse outcomes and people suffering for longer until their surgery can be replanned. So when they tell me that hospitals are cancelling all but very urgent surgery to deal with covid cases, or the number of ICU beds is worryingly low, I listen to them. They won't watch a couple of YouTube videos about jets and tell me how I'm flying wrongly, and I don't watch YouTube videos about viruses and make the mistake of thinking that outranks their medical degrees.
There's no contradiction between what you see of assessing or not assessing a patient's vaccination status, and the planning behind the scenes for what happens at higher case numbers or when hospitals go onto bypass.