Different vid, from yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdK77bhAwO0
I didn't see anything about ventilators in that clip, but the information about the projections vs. the actual numbers was interesting nonetheless. However, the original projections for the spread of the virus did not include a factor for the effect of social distancing. This changes the R0 factor (the number of people the average infected person will spread it to), and slows the spread of the virus. So, the news report did not provide the full story. Typical.
Does your wife know more than the information that is coming out? If so, I'd like to hear her factual rebuttal, as well as how she would know about what's happening behind the scenes than anyone else. Regardless, care should be exercised. Nobody is saying that COVID doesn't exist. From the MSM paints the disposition of DB's, my money is on the majority of them being homeless and immune compromised.
Of course she knows more. She sees it first hand for one thing, talks to her doctor colleagues about it for another, has a daily meeting with her hospital staff to discuss issues related to PPEs, ventilators, etc, and also a conference call with the state department of health a couple times a week. Do you seriously think all that info makes it on the news? Of course not. How many doctors are you talking to? Are you getting your information anywhere but the news and the internet? And if so, are you considering everything you see as factual and unbiased??? You of all people should know that the news organizations are slanted, just like everybody else. Ratings. Follow the money. Goes for Fox and all the major networks, as well, not to mention all the alarmist and conspiracy theory web sites out there.
My wife says that the epidemiologists at her hospital think Covid19 is being way under reported, not over reported, mostly because testing has been very limited. Here is some factual information for you. In Minnesota if you show symptoms, you will only be tested if 1) you are living in group home, like a retirement home, or 2) if you are a health care worker or a family member of a health care worker, or 3) if you are in for non-elective surgery or are a pregnant woman coming in to give birth, or 4) if you are sick enough to be admitted to the hospital. If someone comes into her hospital today with flu-like symptoms, they do not get a Covid19 test unless they are sick enough to be admitted. The reason is that if it's a mild case, the doctors can't do anything anyway, and the testing itself is still bottlenecked, at least here.
Here is another interesting piece of factual information. The tests that are out there are 1) NOT all the same test, and 2) of varying degrees of accuracy. My wife's hospital has developed their own testing protocol, which they say is 90% accurate for detecting presence of the virus. Most other hospitals in our state use the state's department of health test, which has been shown to be only 60% accurate. So a significant number of people who test negative may have the virus anyway.
My wife has had several patients that she has wanted to test for the virus, but they don't meet criteria to allow for the test. Here's an example: about a month ago a kid came into her hospital in respiratory distress. He and his father had just come from Hong Kong, and the father was beginning to show symptoms. At the time, testing for the virus was limited by the CDC to people who had recently been in or around Wuhan China, so this kid didn't qualify despite being in the Hong Kong airport for several hours (where flights from Wuhan had been arriving), and having to be admitted to the hospital for a couple days. My wife went to the extreme of contacting the CDC for permission to run the test, but was turned down. She's pretty sure that both of those people had it. To this day there are restrictions on who gets tested, as mentioned previously.
Here's another example, say somebody dies at home, which still happens a lot. Dead people are not tested for the virus, so deaths are classified as natural causes or from pre-existing conditions. Some of them are, obviously, but many of them may not be.
One piece of good news, again according to my wife, is that the death rate from the virus is probably artificially high, because of the limited testing. So if four times as many people have it as have tested positive, that means the death rate is four times lower than is currently being reported. But there are still a lot of deaths from this stuff. Refrigerated semis parked in hospital parking lots and filled with dead bodies, like what you see in New York, are not normal for our health care system, and indicate an uptick in the death rate.
This situation is just like any other major event, not as bad as the alarmists would have us believe, but more serious than the conspiracy theorists want to think. Everyone has their own opinion; mine is, why take chances?
