Coronavirus All Purpose Thread: The unnecessary Dumb Dumb 4th wave

[topfiverecords]

Originally Posted by pepper24

So you guys are telling me that there isn't one single house to rent in all of Tuscany?

I don’t think Italy wants our Covid patients.

[burn_this_city]

Originally Posted by pepper24

So you guys are telling me that there isn't one single house to rent in all of Tuscany?

I don't think you can get retired doctors and nurses who are licensed by professional boards back into hospitals in time to make any difference. It takes months to get your license back once you've relinquished it.

[Hot_Flatus]

Originally Posted by pepper24

They don't have staffing agencies that can fill these temporary gaps?

They don't offer OT pay for extra work?

Bring back recent retired doctors and nurses for short term help?

Maybe Candy from the Cathouse has some free time to help run a ventilator after her night shift ends across the street if Kenney will let her work for tips.

Nurses and doctors that are already on the brink, who are now being harassed to boot, are not going to be lured by the prospect of coming out of retirement or picking up additional 12 hour shifts for OT pay. This also doesn't consider the fact that you must be highly trained to man an ICU bed, which requires knowledge that many health professionals simply don't have.

[EldrickOnIce]

Originally Posted by pepper24

I'm ok with some sort of vaccine passport if it's temporary and tied to some metric like hospitalizations or ICU.

I liked how past stages were tied to hospitalizations and the reopening this summer was tied to vaccine numbers.

Best vaccine passport metric is % vaccinated.

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

I don't think you can get retired doctors and nurses who are licensed by professional boards back into hospitals in time to make any difference. It takes months to get your license back once you've relinquished it.

Yes and no. As support staff/training resources kinda like a manager to nursing students/doctors and nursing/doctor staff for specific types of treatment, I think it could be done really fast. As a legit full ER/ICU nurse/doctor dealing with a wide array of things, I agree it takes a while to get that back.

Conceptually, maybe the best approach is to basically have them as a resource in a super triage/on site testing set up for Covid only. It shouldn't take too much time to onboard them for a more limited scenario like that. The only problems is the government likely won't want that and why would these people take the risk to get involved with Covid positive or Covid like symptom patients? I guess in theory you'd take over spaces in the university gyms or something?


Vaccine passport isn't going to work IMO. It'll make us feel better, but IMO it will not work. We will overload the current ICU capacity by the end of the year. The only question is how we should address the ICU capacity, lack of staff and potential burn out issue.

[pepper24]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

I don't think you can get retired doctors and nurses who are licensed by professional boards back into hospitals in time to make any difference. It takes months to get your license back once you've relinquished it.

Yeah, not sure how long that would take or if possible. If issue is getting license back then maybe there is a way to speed that up or make exemptions but don't count on anything government or union based to get things done.

[Knut]

There is a serious testing gap right now too.

If you are a close contact to someone who is COVID + you literally can not get a test unless you are symptomatic.

So you can not get a rapid test to be safe and you can not get a PCR test. Also, you do not need to isolate unless symptomatic.

[pepper24]

Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus

Nurses and doctors that are already on the brink, who are now being harassed to boot, are not going to be lured by the prospect of coming out of retirement or picking up additional 12 hour shifts for OT pay. This also doesn't consider the fact that you must be highly trained to man an ICU bed, which requires knowledge that many health professionals simply don't have.

Retired doctors and nurses have that knowledge but agree it's tough to come back after you leave.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus

It doesn't really matter if they add more facilities when you don't have staffing to man the beds. Right now there are up to 4 patients per ICU nurse - the standard is typically 1-1.

To staff additional beds, you're looking at reduced maternity services, cancer treatments, elective surgery cancellation and beyond.

I had heard one nurse say covid patients ideally have a 2 nurse to one patient ratio. But that's an instantaneous metric, because of shifts and days off. According to this article, they say

To run our 17-bed ICU 24/7 we require 54 full-time equivalent ICU-trained registered nurses.

which is, well, close enough to π nurses per bed. Mmmmm pie.


https://www.660citynews.com/2021/09/...are-breakdown/

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by Knut

There is a serious testing gap right now too.

If you are a close contact to someone who is COVID + you literally can not get a test unless you are symptomatic.

So you can not get a rapid test to be safe and you can not get a PCR test. Also, you do not need to isolate unless symptomatic.

That's actually pretty similar to BC's rules (at least for fully vaccinated people), so I don't know that it's necessarily catastrophic.

I do agree though, if they're going to restrict testing, at least make some effort to make at-home rapid testing cheap and available.

[Wormius]

Originally Posted by pepper24

They don't have staffing agencies that can fill these temporary gaps?

They don't offer OT pay for extra work?

Bring back recent retired doctors and nurses for short term help?

You know when health care workers retire, they don’t really keep up their skills. God, imagine the lawsuits from family members when patients die just because the doctor hadn’t been practicing in years.

[marsplasticeraser]

Should this be green text, or are you serious?

You think there is a labour surplus of ICU nurses in a global pandemic? Like there are ICU nurses at home saying "I wish I could find a job". US hospitals are scrambling offering insane contracts just to find nurses, there are 0 nurses globally looking for work, unless they are moving.

Also, I don't know any nurses looking for overtime after 18 months of non-stop pandemic. And the threat of vacations cancelled doesn't help labour relations?

Finally - what retired doctors or nurses want to come back after 2 years of the government ####ting on them? To deal with a self-inflicted pandemic because Kenney and Shandro are too ignorant to follow any of the recommendations from doctors on how to manage this crisis.

Originally Posted by pepper24

They don't have staffing agencies that can fill these temporary gaps?

They don't offer OT pay for extra work?

Bring back recent retired doctors and nurses for short term help?

[MoneyGuy]

Golfed yesterday with a colleague (a bureaucrat, not a medical professional) who until a few months ago worked for the province and has worked with Hinshaw. He says a vac passport/certificate will happen. Timing depends on how long the UCPs can hold out as they’ll lose face for backing off of their assurance there would be none. That alternative is a lock down, and they see that as an absolute last resort.

Also golfed with a lawyer who practises in constitutional law. He told me that he believes it’s likely that any challenge would likely hold up in court (depending on the judge’s bias) as public good and health trumps measures in the Constitution (and the Constitution says that).

[kirant]

Originally Posted by pepper24

They don't have staffing agencies that can fill these temporary gaps?

They don't offer OT pay for extra work?

Bring back recent retired doctors and nurses for short term help?

- AHS, as of mid-August, has enacted policies to cancel vacations and force overtime of current staff...a step beyond offering OT. This has been used in previous waves
- In the December wave, it was also noted that AHS' first plan when seeing shortages is to see which recently retired staff are willing to return. We should have no reason to doubt that it's being used right now (as well as the "proactively trained staff" mentioned in the article)
- The UNA (United Nurses of Alberta) was informed in early September that AHS was going to hire contract nurses through three staffing agencies to deal with shortages

Simply put, these are common sense options to try. However, they are being used and staffing is still a problem.

[Hot_Flatus]

Originally Posted by kirant

- AHS, as of mid-August, has enacted policies to cancel vacations and force overtime of current staff...a step beyond offering OT. This has been used in previous waves
- In the December wave, it was also noted that AHS' first plan when seeing shortages is to see which recently retired staff are willing to return. We should have no reason to doubt that it's being used right now (as well as the "proactively trained staff" that are noted in the article)
- The UNA (United Nurses of Alberta) was informed in early September that AHS was going to hire contract nurses through three staffing agencies to deal with shortages

Simply put, these are common sense options to try. However, they are being used and staffing is still a problem.

You're looking at a drop in the bucket either way as others have mentioned. There just aren't hundreds of Dr's and Nurses just waiting or willing to get back to work. There would be even less now thanks to the horror stories coming out of many hospitals over the last 18 months. By the time anyone available is actually hired, brought up to speed and actually helping, I'd wager the 4th wave is virtually over given the speed that the government moves.

Simply put. You can't afford to let your health system get to this point. Especially when it is/was entirely preventable by exercising even a minute detail of common sense and compassion by listening and reacting instead of disappearing on vacation and putting the wants of unvaxxed scum ahead of the rest of society.

[kirant]

Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus

You're looking at a drop in the bucket either way as others have mentioned, there aren't hundreds of Dr's and Nurses just waiting to get back to work. By the time anyone is hired, brought up to speed and actually helping, I'd wager the 4th wave is virtually over given the speed government moves.

Absolutely. They'll mostly be running with whatever staff they have on hand. Transfers from other departments (necessitating the delay of other services given by AHS) will be the largest factor.


Edit - I think you added a bit more after (your edit is after my post time). My stance is similar to Street Pharmacist's below - there seems to be a disconnect with some about how dire the ICU situation is.

[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by pepper24

They don't have staffing agencies that can fill these temporary gaps?

Not for highly skilled jobs, no. It first requires a 4 year degree and then a lot of specialized training that is fairly intense and expensive. There aren't extras to have at an agency somewhere

They don't offer OT pay for extra work?

Yes, they've been doing crazy OT for a while now and many are too burned out to continue but in many cases are mandated to work overtime. However, AHS has cancelled their holidays, redeployed nurses who also work in other wards and mandated OT (all while telling their union they must accept a pay decrease). These shifts are already 12 hours long, how much longer can they go? There's nothing left to do

Bring back recent retired doctors and nurses for short term help?

Already been done. That well's dry now

See answers in bold. I don't think people realize just how dire this is and they've already decreased the standard of care by moving from one to one patient care to one to four. Guess how many more people die that maybe wouldn't have for non-COVID issues that require ICU care?

[Hot_Flatus]

Originally Posted by kirant

Absolutely. They'll mostly be running with whatever staff they have on hand. Transfers from other departments (necessitating the delay of other services given by AHS) will be the largest factor.

I have already heard directly from health professionals that there are babies being born in hallways and catastrophic wait times beginning to occur (which is saying a lot considering this can happen at the best of times). Toss this in with "safely" delaying critical cancer surgeries and other semi elective treatments and you've basically got the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off in AB hospitals - it's only going to get worse over the next 2-3 weeks before it starts improving.

I sincerely hope nobody loses a vaccinated loved one during the next 4-6 weeks due to a lack of proper care because of the inactions of our government and the selfish inaction of the degenerate antivaxxers, but I'd say this is surely a foregone conclusion at this point.

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by Hot_Flatus

I have already heard directly from health professionals that there are babies being born in hallways and catastrophic wait times beginning to occur (which is saying a lot considering this can happen at the best of times). Toss this in with "safely" delaying critical cancer surgeries and other semi elective treatments and you've basically got the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off in AB hospitals - it's only going to get worse over the next 2-3 weeks before it starts improving.

I sincerely hope nobody loses a vaccinated loved one during the next 4-6 weeks due to a lack of proper care because of the inactions of our government and the selfish inaction of the degenerate antivaxxers, but I'd say this is surely a foregone conclusion at this point.

Some of what you listed was already happening before the pandemic. The pandemic has merely exacerbated these issues.

[guzzy]

Originally Posted by DoubleF

Yes and no. As support staff/training resources kinda like a manager to nursing students/doctors and nursing/doctor staff for specific types of treatment, I think it could be done really fast. As a legit full ER/ICU nurse/doctor dealing with a wide array of things, I agree it takes a while to get that back.

Conceptually, maybe the best approach is to basically have them as a resource in a super triage/on site testing set up for Covid only. It shouldn't take too much time to onboard them for a more limited scenario like that. The only problems is the government likely won't want that and why would these people take the risk to get involved with Covid positive or Covid like symptom patients? I guess in theory you'd take over spaces in the university gyms or something?


Vaccine passport isn't going to work IMO. It'll make us feel better, but IMO it will not work. We will overload the current ICU capacity by the end of the year. The only question is how we should address the ICU capacity, lack of staff and potential burn out issue.

I think the vaccine passport will work. Right now, the 12-39 group is around 60% vaccinated. If you remove the right for unvax'd to go to restaurants, bars and gyms, how quickly are those 18-39 unvax'd folks going to wait until they are vaccinated? Right now if they are fully unvax'd, they have to wait minimum 4-6 weeks before they can go out again. How many people in this category are going to do that? Very few.

I think vaccine passport puts over 80% in less than 6 weeks. Right now the biggest spreaders are the 18-39 group because they are vaccine hesitant (and invincible in many of their minds). We need to target that group and the passport is the best way to do it.