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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On December 08 2021 08:50 maybenexttime wrote:
I'm pretty sure the limiting factor when it comes to ICUs is the lack of staff, not the lack of beds themselves. I don't think two years is nearly enough time to train more people, but I may be wrong.
Staffing shortages as the driving constraint to ICU bed availability seems to check out (in the US at least), but there's not exactly a shortage of people trained in nursing who would be able to support if the conditions of employment were more favorable than they are.
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It's difficult to train more staff. Nursing isn't exactly a 2 year diploma in most cases, and for ICU ready nurses, it's quite a bit longer than that.
Even if you increased the nursing pipeline as soon as the pandemic hit, it still wouldn't have made a difference.
https://www.bcit.ca/programs/nursing-bachelor-of-science-in-nursing-full-time-8875bsn/
This is one of the best rated nursing programs local to me, and it's a 3 year, full time (3 semesters a year) program. Maybe in another 2-3 years, you'll see increases in staffing, but it's not feasible to increase the amount of nurses we have.
With the hospitalization rates amongst elderly, it's still important to limit spread, because of how high the danger is to them, even with a booster dose.
The constraint on return to normal is hospital capacity. We need enough free staff and beds to handle all normal surgeries, exams, tests etc that people go through outside of covid before we can think about relaxing measures. It's a tenuous equilibrium that most places are in right now, with covid patients crowding out other procedures, which necessitates far more resources than can be allocated.
Provincially, our surgical backlog is 82,420 surgeries as of July 2021. That's a crapton of surgeries that we're working on reducing. Some backlog must exist for efficiency, but waiting months for surgery is not uncommon, and covid patients put a lot of pressure on the backlog.
https://news.gov.bc.ca/files/surgical-renewal-progress-report-June-July-2021.pdf
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From what I am hearing from nurses, covid will just make people want to be nurses less. Being a nurse totally blows. You need to love the idea of helping people a great deal in order for being a nurse to feel remotely tenable. I would probably recommend anyone against being a nurse after covid. Under paid, treated like shit, you work terrible hours. What is the appeal other than being a good person?
I can think of like 20 different careers where you are treated better, work better hours and make more money with a MS.
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On December 07 2021 15:12 xM(Z wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:
To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao
This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. so your whole point is: we're already fucked so another deep jabbing thrust means nothing. what kind of argument is that?.
It's the kind of argument that is supposed to show how ridiculous it is to complain about the impending doom from covid related travel restrictions when there are already much more severe travel restrictions that cannot be simply bypassed by spending 20 minutes at a doctor's office.
It's the kind of argument that should make it obvious why complaining about the increased "government monitoring" from Covid restrictions is outright absurd when "the government" already has all the data on you a stupid vaccination certificate has and so, so much more. If you are not able to articulate what kind of additional data on you a vaccination certificate provides to "the government" that they don't already have and how that data is in any way, shape, or form more suitable than (or even remotely comparable to) the existing one in "monitoring" you, then maybe, just maybe, entertain the possibility that the vaccination certificate is not an underhanded monitoring tool by shadowy nefarious forces, but an honest attempt to alleviate a pressing world-wide medical and societal issue.
"A deep jabbing thrust"!? If a stupid QR code that you can get at zero cost and close to no time expense is a "deep jabbing thrust", then you must consider pretty much every regulation you have to comply with in a non-anarchist society as getting drawn and quartered.
On December 07 2021 21:53 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:
Yes and how odd to complain about the government being able to store all your phone and internet data for two years, the expansion of NSA powers and by extension the TSA, Patriot act etc.All of that was brought in after the 9/11 terror attacks by the government to ‘keep people safe’.
So he has seen how that turned out and didn’t like it.Can’t see it’s basically the same scenario playing out again and it doesn’t end with just needing to show some proof of vax to go overseas.Well i guess there are people who will roll over and there are those who will resist.
"Basically the same scenario"? So, the government is going to collect all my personal information and my entire digital footprint a second time around? What more exactly do you expect them to be able to collect?
And just to make it clear: Your government does not require your proof of vaccination to let you go overseas. Your destination's government requires it. Just like your destination's government will often enough require you to have a valid visa. In any case, if you cannot go overseas, don't complain about your government but about the destination’s government...
On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus.
You are very much correct that it is not the same. My ID actually exists in government databases that both border control and the police have access to. My vaccination certificate on the other hand is a QR code that lists my name, date of birth, and date of vaccination. And while my vaccination status probably exists in some government database somewhere, nobody that checks my vaccination certificate has any access to it as of yet - currently, the vaccination status at closed locations, at least here in Germany, is checked by a minimum wage worker that scans the QR code and compares the shown name to the one on my regular ID. There is no access to any database and there certainly is not any logging going on. And considering how bad the internet infrastructure here is and how far digitalization efforts of government services have advanced in the past 15 years despite them being top priority, I am not too worried about any vaccination tracking being implemented any time soon. But let's entertain the idea that the government actually implements such a system in the near future (a bit of a laughable presumption at least here in Germany given that till a couple of months ago, infection and vaccination numbers were compiled by faxing papers around + Show Spoiler +). So what exactly should I worry about? That the government will be able to track my exact location at a single point in time in some days of the week? How is this information any more valuable to them and more dangerous to me than the location data my mobile provider has to keep on me for the government for any moment in time for the past 2 years? + Show Spoiler + Here, we are back to the question: How can one argue that the covid related measures are a control/monitoring/suppression tool when they add no surplus value to what the government already has access to? Or is it maybe possible that these measures are actually an honest attempt at a proper reaction to a world-wide pandemic?
Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system.
"Written on the wall"? This sounds like a claim that needs a whole lot more explanation. Alternatively, you can just post a picture of this wall, so I can read the writings myself.
Oh, and I have no clue how it is in Chile, but unpaid fines most definitively do get logged here in Germany. They not only get logged but not paying them earns you even more fines and surprisingly often not paying them will land you in jail (10% of the jail population in Germany + Show Spoiler +. The same applies to not paying child support by the way. And honestly, if your government is not able to keep track of your outstanding fines, I would not be too worried about them being able to keep track of you vaccination status...
On December 08 2021 00:16 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 23:24 Acrofales wrote:
Why? Seeing as these measures are very explicitly emergency measures to combat Covid, what makes you think it will go beyond that?
And no, the patriot act cannot be referred to, because huge leeway was given in defining "terrorism", whereas the anti-covid measures are narrowly defined to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can argue that the measures taken are draconian and unnecessary to combat the disease, but slippery slope reasoning about how measures against Covid will be used to "sneak" in other measures that have nothing to do with Covid in western democracies is ridiculous. Could someone like Erdogan or Putin latch onto curbing freedoms for Covid to curb freedoms in general? I guess. But Erdogan and Putin have a rather dismal record of curtailing peoples' freedoms anyway. You can see a clear pattern of intent in their actions to increasingly restrict their populations' freedoms. That same cannot be said for western Democracies (although I guess GH could probably make a case against this statement in the specific case of minorities in the USA). Well for starters, the fact that covid won't go away anytime soon, given it's a respiratory disease. They are not passing "laws" in most countries (as in votes by the parliament), it's the state dictating what measures will be taking and you are not allowed to question or resist them. Vaccines, masks and therapeutics are widely available for months now, there is nothing that justifies compulsory restrictions. Many western democracies are far more tyranical than both Putin and Erdogan on this regard, I wish that would raise at least some caution on more people.To put it another way. When does the emergency end and who gets to decide when it ends? Or are we just supposed to accept this will go on as long as covid exists (ie forever)
So, Western democracies are more "tyrannical" than Putin and Erdogan in regard to Corona measures? Hard to argue with that. A new wave of fascism has clearly swept over those Western so-called democracies! Oh, or maybe actual autocrats have figured out that asking your population to get a couple of possibly life-saving injections and carry around a stupid QR code is far less effective in cementing yourself as a de-facto dictator than passing laws to expand the powers of your personal office, then removing any limits on your terms' duration while jailing your political opposition and removing all non-compliant media outlets.
Hard to say when the emergency will end without a crystal ball. Inconveniently, pandemics don't announce their expiration date when they strike. Forever is probably a bit of a stretch, though. If you really want to ball-park it, take a look at previous pandemics. The Spanish flu raged for 3 years. The first wave of the black death lasted 8 years. Whatever it turns out to be, the point in time with the highest number of infections (ie right now) most certainly is not the moment when the emergency ends.
On December 08 2021 07:40 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:
I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus.
Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system. It really doesn't matter that these things are not at all alike. Most of the people in this thread are hellbent on using whatever false equivalences and whataboutisms to justify anything and everything the government wants to restrict for them. The government could announce tomorrow that to combat climate change you're not allowed to drive your car on Tuesdays and Thursdays and people in this thread would rush to defend it by saying "The government already imposes restrictions on driving like you're not allowed to drive on the wrong side of the road, so how is this any different?!?¿!!?"
When you accuse somebody of false equivalences, you should probably explain what exactly those faults are, especially when you are provided with specific examples and reasoning as to why in those equivalences one particular thing is less impactful or restricting than another existing thing. Making up ridiculous hypotheticals on completely unrelated topics most certainly is not a valid argument.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On December 08 2021 10:51 Mohdoo wrote:
From what I am hearing from nurses, covid will just make people want to be nurses less. Being a nurse totally blows. You need to love the idea of helping people a great deal in order for being a nurse to feel remotely tenable. I would probably recommend anyone against being a nurse after covid. Under paid, treated like shit, you work terrible hours. What is the appeal other than being a good person?
I can think of like 20 different careers where you are treated better, work better hours and make more money with a MS.
I'd file nursing down with teaching or retail as "shittiest jobs to have in 2021" despite being better on paper than either of those (at least the salary is almost livable). Nurses seem to be leaving the field in droves and I don't blame them in the slightest.
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Exactly. We need more nurses. But somehow that doesn't translate into making that job more attractive. Even if we made nursing a dream job right now, it would still take 3 more years for new people to be fully trained. But we are not doing that, we are just hoping that new nurses magically appear out of nowhere, and in the meantime we work the ones that still exist to the bone, making the job less attractive and thus new nurses even less likely to appear.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
You're missing the point. There's plenty of already trained nurses that would be available were the conditions more amenable, but who under the current conditions are willing to only work as contractors or not at all. To see that happening and then conclude "we need to send people to college to train new nurses from scratch" is downright absurd. Why not start with those that are already able?
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Yeah, maybe i was overshooting with that "3 years" time thing. However, i think the more important thing is that if we want more nurses, we must make nursing more attractive, and yet we seem to be going in the opposite direction.
I was also looking at this in a long-term fashion, because a very similar thing keeps happening with high school (lower path for less intelligent children) teachers here in Germany. Few people want the job, so the people who can do it get overworked, making it less attractive for new people to get into the job.
Overworking the people you have is a short-term solution to the problem of having not enough people, but in the long term it only makes things worse.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Also keep in mind that however bad the working conditions for nurses are in Europe, the US will doubtless find a way to one-up you on badness.
There’s no shortage of articles about our nationwide nursing shortage. Everywhere, foreboding headlines paint a dire picture of a health care system stressed by a skyrocketing number of patients and a dwindling number of nurses able to care for them.
But there are no attendant articles about hospital corporations, public health systems, and politicians rising to meet this shortage. One would expect hospitals to be aggressively recruiting and retaining as many nurses as possible with competitive pay, safe working conditions, and attractive benefits. But industry-wide labor disputes throughout the pandemic indicate that the opposite is true.
Industry bosses’ refusal to address this labor shortage by granting nurses even the most basic rights and protections — despite our nation’s major health systems making billions in surplus over the course of the pandemic — suggests that this crisis in nursing isn’t a crisis for everybody.
In fact, for decades hospital corporations, obsessed with profit over all else, have been cutting staffing levels while putting increased stress and unrealistic demands on the workers who remain. The result is an impossible situation in which workers are pushed to do more with less, leading to nurses and other health care workers leaving the field due to stress and an inability to provide adequate care for their patients.
When staffing is cut to the bone by health care companies looking to line their pockets, patient care suffers, often with devastating consequences. Researchers have shown that, after controlling for patient and hospital characteristics, each additional patient assigned to a nurse increases the odds that one of those patients will die by 7 percent.
Source
There's a lot of things that can be done - improvement in working conditions, better pay, etc. - that won't be, and more people will die as a result.
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Northern Ireland25467 Posts
Most nurses I’ve spoken to, one of whom did actually leave the field think that they absolutely deserve more pay, but it’s the working conditions and burnout that are the real killer, sometimes literally.
What gets them into the field in the first place, namely wanting to care for people can be a bonus if you want to cost cut, that inclination will see a willingness to take a bit less pay to be doing good (although not desirable).
It’s a double edged sword though, that altruistic bent. If people feel they can’t actually do their job and patients may suffer through them burning out, they’re more likely to take themselves away than an overworked office worker as that sense of duty of care is important to many of them.
Granted living costs here are considerably lower than many areas of the mainland U.K, no nurse’s pay is (relatively) less low than over there, where that’s a huge factor in a collective loss of morale.
Ultimately the NHS is being pushed to the limit of what its staff can take, and people are going to die as a result.
It’s extremely short-sighted, not only are you losing veterans in the here and now, you’re replacing them with newbies who frequently have to learn on the job with less shadowing, and these conditions are known to the next generation considering getting in.
Not the same area, from my experience of doing 14 hour shifts on my feet quite regularly, they’re doable but I’m really glad I’m doing nothing non menial for the last few hours. Did a 22 hour shift once and was a zombie automaton for the last bit.
I can’t imagine putting in hours like that on the regular in a place where I need to be mentally alert and people’s health is on the line without fuckups being exponentially more likely, but NHS staff are being expected to do this all the time.
It’s not just brutal on said staff, it’s dangerous to patients to have healthcare providers operate on the red line as a regular occurrence. The odd shift is one thing, but it’s not the occasional shift for many, it’s almost normal
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Government should offer more employment perks to medical workers due to their essential function (other groups include police officers, firefighters, etc). There's plenty of money in the pension pot. It's just that a huge chunk goes to other less essential people* in the civil service.
*Having worked in the public sector before, I can vouch for so much dead wood in the administrative and managerial staff...
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A number of my friends work in hospitals training to be doctors. It's all about money and working hours. As noble as the profession is, majority of medical professionals are in it to make a comfortable living. Prestige and saving lives is just icing on the cake.
That's not to put down medical personnel. The same applies to all other high skilled professionals. Bankers and lawyers get a lot of negative flak from the public. Do they care? No. Money is a good insurance to any mental or moral strain, anyway.
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On December 09 2021 00:15 RKC wrote:
A number of my friends work in hospitals training to be doctors. It's all about money and working hours. As noble as the profession is, majority of medical professionals are in it to make a comfortable living. Prestige and saving lives is just icing on the cake.
That's not to put down medical personnel. The same applies to all other high skilled professionals. Bankers and lawyers get a lot of negative flak from the public. Do they care? No. Money is a good insurance to any mental or moral strain, anyway.
I majored in chemistry in undergrad. Unfortunately had to share a lot of classes with premeds. The vast majority of premed folks are awful people who have an incredibly poor grasp of science. Just soulless shit heads hyper obsessed with prestige and money. I would say out of my graduating class, I would only be comfortable with 10% of them being my doctor just from the perspective of who they are as people.
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Northern Ireland25467 Posts
I would assume you’d get more soulless types being doctors in the US as I believe it’s considerably more lucrative? Or at least potentially so.
Be it the length of training needed, the salaries outside of certain gigs there are easier ways to make money over here. Although amongst some doctors I have known prestige IMO trumps altruism in some of their motivation
Im a bit loath to generalise, I’ve met docs running the full gamut of oblivious money/prestige-obsessed shithead to borderline saints.
This goes for nurses as well. The discourse to justify pay and conditions too frequently descends into hagiographic terms, as if every nurse is Florence Nightingale reincarnated.
It’s just bollocks, they shouldn’t be paid more and have better conditions because they’re collectively Saints, but given a sufficient remuneration for the important job they do for society, and given working conditions that enable them to perform their duties properly.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Salary may not be the end-all be-all but it certainly is the singular most important factor in what jobs people do and don't stay at. Plus it's a much more straightforward lever to pull - giving every nurse a $20k salary boost is going to be an obvious motivator for working more, whereas dealing with the nuances of what does and doesn't make for better working conditions is much tougher. Not that we don't need to deal with the latter - the last few years have erased all doubt about that. But if we need more nurses to deal with a pandemic surge, we'd go far with little more than just creating a hazard pay fund out of some equitable mix of hospital/insurance profits and government funding.
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Another thing: I think nurse wages are only as low as they are because of the culture of women being nurses a long time ago. Nurses should probably be paid 75%-90% what a doctor is paid, not like 30%
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EPT
