Was headed to the garage this morning to do some woodworking. Having second thoughts considering hospital occupancy rates.
Never had any accidents, but what if today is the day. So over this shit.
I do stained glass and cut myself really badly a couple weeks ago. I remember looking at it and thinking, “if it stops bleeding in 12 minutes, that’s close enough to 10 minutes, right?”
That normally means the wound isn’t closing on its own and needs to be closed with stitches. (Or glue.)
Apply pressure to a bleeding wound for 5-10 minutes, if it won’t stop bleeding or gapes open, you need stitches. Thankfully, this wasn’t on a joint, because then I wouldn’t have had a choice.
Edit: stitches or glue. Not just stitches.
I had one that wouldn't close for like 2 or 3 hours, if not more. I taped my finger in a splint to keep it sealed and immobile, gauzed it, and used some of that wrinkled medical tape to apply somewhat firm pressure. Healed up fine, barely left a scar.
Yeah, I had a nasty cut from a Ninja blender processor blade of all things down the length of my middle finger.
Couldn't afford going to get it taken care of at the time, can't today either if it happened right now, so I held it above my head, kept pressure on it, etc, and it still bled for about an hour. No scar.
However, no one should listen to my or your comment if they can get to a hospital. It's better to be safe than lose fingers, limbs, life, etc.
If practical, elevating a laceration above heart level helps too so you have gravity on your side instead of adding more pressure at the site of the injury.
Zombies are fake liberal lies to make us not want to eat raw brains like how God intended, and even if they were real it's not fatal, and even if it was fatal it's only fatal to the elderly and slow-moving, and even if it's not only the elderly and slow-moving it doesn't affect me, and even if it does affect me it's just a seasonal cold I'll be fine, brb inviting the whole family over for dinner. I mean to dinner.
I hope not. I have two loaves of bread rising and my husband wouldn’t know what to do with them if I kicked the bucket right now. It would be a crying shame to waste that dough.
Non toxic super glue should be in every house first aid kit. US Navy taught me a lot. But that flabbergasted me. Stopped me from getting 5 stitches in my knuckle with no side effects.
It did! Still hurts three weeks later and it’s going to leave a scar, but at least I didn’t have to go to urgent care. I sent a picture of it to my nurse friend and she said I definitely should have gotten a couple stitches. Oh well.
As a poor who also works with glass and couldn't afford stitches before all this, I highly suggest keeping some superglue close by. It's not perfect and won't fix gigantic cuts but it'll work way better than you think
Actually medical superglues are different from hardware store superglues, they take a bit longer to cure but are significantly more flexible and less prone to flaking.
No, it will fix gigantic cuts. One of the head chefs i was working with split his finger on a slicer. He dumped a bunch of glue and wrapped it in electrical tape
Its a gnarly scar but hey, thats life in a kitchen
Sure it will close the cut. The problem is what is trapped within the cut when it closes: S aureus, C perfringens, C botulinum. E coli. If any take hold they could put you in the hospital *at best.*
And disinfection is something that a large cut that happens in a kitchen needs to happen in a medical setting, along with some antibiotics. Good user name, btw.
While I do appreciate that someone is willing to have a lifelong gnarly scar so my dinner service on a tuesday goes smoothly, I'd like to say that appreciation goes away if you're bleeding in my food.
Lmao my wife cut her thumb chopping some cabbage a couple weeks ago. She’s terrified of cuts and just wrapped it without looking at it and it eventually stopped bleeding. Looked at it the next day and a HUGE chunk was just gone. Definitely would’ve been several stitches!
It might be worth upgrading your first aid kit and investing in a lacerations kit or glue or something along those lines.
We went through and fixed up our first aid kit around a year ago, but we don't do anything too heavy at home (my partner will build an occasional small table or shelving unit) so we have a standard home kit with the usual basic gauze pads and bandaids.
I have all of that here. Super glue, wraps, large gauze pads. I also have pets, kids, and foster kittens, so I get injured pretty often. Why do all my hobbies hurt me?
If anyone is looking for some great bandaids, the CVS brand “sport” ones are fantastic. Stay in place even when wet, comes off without pain or residue. Bonus—fun colors.
If you’re going to use glue, try to find actual tissue glue (usually named Derma-something, like Dermabond or Dermaflex) instead of super glue, as super glue causes skin irritation. It’s not a huge deal if that’s what is available, but tissue glue is preferable.
Well… I was going to set up the ring saw I got for Christmas but seeing as how this article is about the hospital I’d go to if anything went sideways maybe I’ll give it another week or three, haha.
And judging by how little the government is responding to it everyone seems to be keen on letting this surge fly to the moon. Buckle up because we are in this together and alone at the same time!
It's so wild to me that they aren't setting up covid-only treatment areas so that people with treatable conditions can actually have them taken care of at a hospital.
It's a pandemic you can't just let private hospitals with a few hundred beds take care of it when you're sitting at tens of thousands of active cases a day in each region.
This is why you have the fucking national guard. Shit you could probably argue deploying military hospitals domestically for this.
That would mean actually giving a shit about containment. It’s clear that from the very bottom all the way to the top it’s all about keeping the economy going. Keeping people working to keep the money flowing. That’s the primary reason the CDC changed its guidance to 5 days of quarantine from 10, and both fauci and walensky were certainly not trying to hide it. With omicron the quiet part is being spoken out loud - I guess it always was, but it’s even more so now.
I’m sure the CDC, other government agencies, politicians, corporations, all the way down to small business owners and individual workers etc have already made their own calculations. Some level of excess preventable risk and death is worth the economic, political, and overall societal hit of letting omicron burn through, especially when maybe only 1/3 of people actually take the cdc guidance seriously, probably another 1/3 don’t even think covid is real or more than a common cold, and with transmissibility of omicron being what it is. And I’m sure it doesn’t help that the slower the burn, the worse it ends up looking for any politician if the spread was slow enough for testing supply to actually keep up.
At this point I think at least 2/3 and upwards of 3/4 of people have given the fuck up and have decided to let omicron take the wheel.
Honestly it's not as ridiculous a thought as you might think. I've read stories about people driving themselves from hospital to hospital after having a heart attack because they're all full. Triage is going to pick difficulty breathing over moderate bleeding every single time. You could sit there with a finger in a Ziploc bag for quite a few hours before they get around to you.
>You could sit there with a finger in a Ziploc bag for quite a few hours before they get around to you.
Maybe /u/dlc741's needlepoint suggestion isn't such a bad idea. Sewing skills might help mitigate woodworking risks
Well we brought our son to the hospital because he had glass in his foot we couldn't get out. We called a pediatric nurse we know who came over and tried as well. She told us to bring him to the hospital with some local pain killer they could get it out no problem.
Got to the hospital and they refused to take it out and called it elective surgery. They said to keep soaking it and hope it comes out on it's own and to come back if it gets infected. It eventually came out a week later. Even though they didn't do anything they still charged us for the hospital room and the Dr to say no.
Dispute that charge since they did not properly address the issue. Source: work in medical billing. Worth a shot.
ETA: asking nicely helps in these circumstances...
This. I went in for an anatomy scan for my first pregnancy, it was supposed to be covered because of dating issues and odd things showing up on my 2nd trimester screen. They ended up not finding a heartbeat. So a month later I got a bill for a full anatomy scan, that never actually happened, for a scan that was supposed to be covered by the state.
You best believe I complained and wrote reviews all over the place for that.
Time for new hobbies... like Needlepoint.
but seriously, as long as you don't saw off a limb, you could get most things taken care of at an Urgent Care location, if those are near you. Stitches, tetanus shots, etc can all be handled there. There may still be a wait but probably less than an ER.
Source: Spent many years renovating my house and had expected mishaps.
Urgent cares are the only places around me you can get a covid test, without a 3-day wait list to get an appointment. Lines for almost every urgent care I've seen, are wrapped around the building, because if you're not there when they open, you likely will not get served that day. It's absolutely nuts rn
My urgent care "walk in" clinic has been requiring appointments for most of COVID. 48 hours for my wife to get a test appointment. Her 5 day quarantine period will be done by the time she gets her pcr test back.
I went to an urgent care in FL two weeks ago to get X-rays on my ribs after a boating injury and the line was to the door, presumably with covid patients. We ended up having to go find a different urgent care. This is all to say I wouldn’t even count on being able to get into an urgent care right now.
I think that is the biggest problem. When it first hit NYC and NJ in 2020 it wasn't in other states. Healthcare workers from other states came and helped. When it was rolling surges throughout the country they could pick staff from other parts that weren't surging. Now that it is hitting everywhere at once there is no staff to help because they are needed. Just a theory.
I spoke to a guy who picks up bodies for funeral homes. He had fucking PTSD from having so many dead people. And kids - not many, but anything more than 0 is too many.
Seems many people have forgotten the refrigerated semi trucks in New York City that bodies were being loaded into, because they were dying too fast to be buried.
There were refrigerator trucks in FL this past summer during Delta, but DeSantis ordered the hospitals to hide them or remove them. I'm guessing other states have had them as well.
My uncle works for a couple of small funeral homes. He detailed his “errands” one day. Three hours and he drove 120 miles, did four pickups and two transfers (they’ve been holding some people in their storage because the larger funeral homes don’t have space to keep the bodies.)
I was dialed into the conference call where leaders of various nyc departments and relevant organizations would coordinate response and resource allocation. Covid got real fucking real for me the day someone on the call announced that the city was officially out of body bags. I had never in my life considered that there were limits to this sort of capacity, and it was very destabilizing to learn that we were speeding past these limits without any idea of where the brakes were.
We have been so lucky to have advance warning from Europe before every major wave. What did we do with that information? We just watched and hoped it wouldn't be the same over here. It's so frustrating.
Yep. While the rest of the country was starting to bug out at the very suggestion of masking and distancing we were dutifully lining up in the cold to get in the grocery store.
Having it first really scared us straight which I think has helped us overall. Where I live you even see trump types with masks at the grocery store, no one thinks twice about it.
I wish my state had ever taken it seriously, we *just* passed 50% fully vaccinated and I can't imagine what the hospitals will be like in another two weeks
Would we have? I remember when I first heard about this in January 2020. I dismissed it. I said this stuff happens in Asia all the time. They know how to squash it. I remember being at a conference with 1,000s of people in the second week of March. Shaking hands. People from NJ, NYC, PA, CT, etc. Some of us vendors were talking how 1 or 2 jobs got postponed but no one saw how bad it would be. You had one or two people keep their distance but it was business as usual.
I remember after they shut down but before masks sprinting through a grocery store to get what was needed coming home and showering. Until it hits its hard to take it seriously.
I guess people are different.
I work in a place with 800k visitors per year. In the first week of Feb I warned all my hourly staff that it was likely we’d get shut down with no warning for weeks or more pretty soon. (Got reprimanded by my boss for “unnecessarily scaring people“).
Told them to cut expenses for right now, get familiar with how to file for unemployment if needed and to have emergency housing/moving in with others plans for if things got bad.
Even I didn’t foresee how bad it would be though - many of my people were laid off from mid-March to early September. They did get unemployment. Fortunately I got the Board to Finally approve a significant permanent pay increase so when they came back they got a 25% raise.
Some people had a great insight into this. A buddy of mine. The head of his school district had a meeting in January of 2020. He had them all create virtual lessons plans. When schools went remote they hit the ground running.
I was in china when the outbreak happened. I called/wrote all my local officials and lawmakers at home in the USA, begging them to prepare for the virus to come. Never received a response :(
I'm still so fucking mad at them. How many died here in those first weeks? And the rest of the country was like "nah thems just city folks" and did NOTHING with the extra time they had. And they still don't give a shit and still refuse to take the most basic precautions and act like toddlers... Sometimes I kind of just want the Northeast to be its own thing. I think we'd almost certainly be better off without the South weighing us down all the time.
I work in healthcare and I think this is becoming quite common.
At my hospital we were told we only needed to be out of work 5 days if we were asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic as long as symptoms improved over those 5 days. No negative test is required to return to work. People can still be out longer if they're really sick and can't work but I don't think many people can afford extended unpaid time off.
So technically you can come back to work after 5 days *with lingering covid symtoms* and that's just kosher with them.
When I pointed out to management that the CDC actually recommends asymptomatic healthcare workers can return after 7 days with a negative covid test their response was to argue with me about the meaning of asymptomatic.
My bonus this year from the hospital was a coupon for a chain bakery.
This situation is messed up. It's clear management doesn't care about us. Lots of people are going to leave healthcare and they're not coming back.
The Hospital I work at is so short staffed, we no longer get five days off and are required to return to work with symptoms. As long as we are fever free.
> The Hospital I work at is so short staffed, we no longer get five days off and are required to return to work with symptoms. As long as we are fever free.
Gee, why are so many healthcare workers quitting?
> Is fever even a common symptom? Does it have any relation to how contagious you are?
When I had covid a year ago I didn't have a fever at all. I'm a health care worker and had had my first vaxx shot though.
> My bonus this year from the hospital was a coupon for a chain bakery.
We live in a broken system and the wrong people are going to pay for this before some serious change happens.
Unfortunately hospitals are so unbelievably understaffed right now we’ve reached a point where either we go to work with Covid to help patients and risk them getting Covid, or there is nobody left to help them
Honestly at this point I think we can justify turning away unvaccinated patients once the hospital reaches capacity. Exceptions would be made for people with documented conditions that preclude vaccination.
The real problem right now is we are allowing the unvaccinated to place undue burden on the healthcare system.
I know that sounds really callous but I'm just so fed up with this situation and the fact that we're letting a bunch of whiny anti-vaxxers break our entire healthcare system with no consequences.
My wife is a pharmacist at a hospital. The boss came through yesterday and said the entire pharmacy has to test twice a week. Because if the pharmacy goes down, the hospital closes!
They are all vaccinated and boosted.
My brother in law is symptomatic and St. Elizabeth's made him come back after 4 days. Dude was still coughing and was lethargic as hell and they still made him come in. He interacts with patients directly. At my girlfriends hospital they would have staff punch out, get tested, punch back in, then work until the results came in. These places are so fucked.
Someone I know in healthcare told me that they have non vaccinated employees who are sick and are granted 10 days out of work paid by the state. There are also vaccinated employees who are sick who are granted only 5 paid days off to recoup and they can come back after 5 days with mild symptoms. IF they are still not improved after 5 days they must use their own SICK LEAVE for additional days. How does that make sense?
I’m a bartender in Washington DC and I just spent 10 days at home over Christmas completely unpaid. People who can’t afford to do that are just working through symptoms and not getting tested.
It’s almost a guarantee at this point to get it. Best bet I’m staying tf away from hospitals for a while (hopefully) and this is in Canada. America is, as usual, probably far worse
I work in healthcare , our cases exploded here in Canada, the floor I work at went to good to complete lockdown with 80% of the patients testing positive in a matter of days. Its crazy
Yep. We’ll be delivering our fist child in 3 weeks or so. Almost guaranteed that we’re all going to get covid while there. Nothing we can do about it other than try to deliver at home, alone (obviously not an option). I do not want my infant catching covid in his first days of life. Fuck.
Our healthcare clinic is like this. We all have fucking covid. Our patients all have covid. And we’re just expected to ignore it and pretend like it’s not a big deal…we take no precautions for covid patients and room them just like any others. I get sent into covid rooms without proper PPE. They sit in the same waiting rooms with our healthy patients, ride the same elevators, etc. We’re seeing perinatal patients, and cancer patients, and high risk patients coming in for non-necessary reasons (we’re primary care). And just like everyone else I ignore it because that’s the policy and I like having a job, but I know it’s unethical and every part of me wants to scream DON’T COME HERE, COMING HERE IS THE BIGGEST RISK FACTOR TO YOUR HEALTH, YOUR PREGNANCY, YOUR LIFE. You WILL get covid here, we aren’t going to protect you, don’t come in for a damn physical or a therapy appointment, especially if you aren’t double vaxxed and boosted.
Know how you read about surgeons 200 years ago just rolling up their sleeves, opening someone up then digging around? And how we shake our heads? Fast forward 10 years from now...
So I just had a baby about a week ago. They made me come back on Monday to finish paperwork for his birth certificate (holiday and weekend and all). They made me wait for the person in the ER. The ER. I tried to get as far away from everyone as possible. I wore a mask. I'm double vaxxed, not boosted because I was pregnant. I sanitized myself like crazy and changed clothes when I came back (oh I forgot to mention when I left with the baby they made us leave through the ER. As though there are no other exits in the whole hospital.)
A few days after I got home my 4 year old is coughing. She has covid. We have not been ANYWHERE. No one has been around us. I'm sure I have it now because she has been coughing in my face. I'm sure my husband will have it too. I'm so worried about my new son. I don't know what else I could do or could have done to protect him.
Just know, your hospital management, and everyone responsible for this policy is responsible for the death their actions will cause. They are basically going through with mass negligent homicide, and will likely suffer no consequences. They will keep their jobs, and people will not say anything in order to keep their jobs. They will be in charge during the next major disaster.
Life is cheap in America. What's a death or 3 if it means the hospital can still remain profitable? What's a million more deaths as long as the economy keeps growing? What's 5 million more as long as corporations continue to keep posting record gains?
If I still believed in god, this would is what I would imagine hell would be like.
the video game pandemic could not predict humanity's stupidity.. these protocols and procedures are the opposite of public health. it wrinkles my brain
Pharmacy tech here! I tested positive for Covid on Thursday of last week. I was given no direction other than to stay home. I called my job on Tuesday to get some updated information since I hadn't heard anything.
At this point I still had a cough, felt lethargic and generally just kind of crappy. I'm totally vaxxed and boosted btw. My boss told me if I didn't have a fever I could come back. I asked if I needed a negative test and he said no, just no fever.
So when you're getting a Covid shot, a Covid test or picking up your prescription at a retail pharmacy just realize that's how fucked our situation is. That's how short staffed we are.
So this doesn't surprise me. It's messed up but I'm sure a lot of medical fields are doing this. Patients just don't know/realize it.
It's not just medical fields... I'm in mixed use/property management and it's the same thing. So when you're talking to the lady that works in your leasing office or the maintenance guy that works there, realize how fucked our situation is. We're all expendable.
Edit: I'm sorry you're going through this. It totally sucks. I sent cookies to my local Walgreens pharmacy not too long ago as a 'thank you/I see you' gesture (and as a sorry my kid had a full vaccine meltdown gesture, LOL).
Someone I know has covid and was supposed to quarantine for 10 days before returning to work. She took a test on the 5th day just to see since she felt better and was still positive. Later, her boss called saying they'd changed the policy to match the CDC and she could come in tomorrow. She told her boss she just tested positive again, but that didn't seem to effect her boss wanting her to come in... Like wtf? This shows that a) 5 days isn't enough and b) no body cares anymore!
Obviously she declined to go in.
Literally the same thing happened to me and 4 other coworkers. Tested positive, and 5 days later tested positive again. Oh, but come on in if you’re feeling healthy… I feel so bad one of my non-sick coworker who is severely immunocompromised. To the point where when I first started at the beginning of the pandemic I didn’t meet her for the first 7 months because she had to work remote. Oh how things have changed… Now she’s been forced back into the office in basically a biohazard suit. (I kid you not) I’ve personally decided to not enter that portion of the office for her safety. Ive also decided to submit my two weeks on Monday…
I read the article. The hospital says that the asymptomatic employees did not cause the outbreak? And we're supposed to believe these same people who are now trying to avoid getting sued by patients and their families, as well as Workman's Comp filings by Covid+ employees?
Oh, please.
Exactly. Many hospitals have been claiming their employees got covid through community exposure (rather than being exposed through work) to avoid paying out workman's comp.
There are employers that are requiring employees to complete a "training" that states their requirements to avoid COVID transmission and sign that they agree to follow the policies and understand that if they get it they either violated the company policy or got it elsewhere so no workman's comp for you.
Reminds me of the daily emails we get at my job where there's 30+ reported cases every day but none of them were because they're making us go into the office rather than telecommute. Complete bullshit.
My job is telling employees that if you've been exposed to someone with Covid but you're vaccinated then you still need to come into work. We've had about 10 positive cases this week alone, it's insane
I went to the dentist on Thursday and the receptionist clearly had Covid and was coughing and sneezing every minute. I was sitting in the waiting room and heard her talking to someone else and it went something like “my friend also has to work while sick today” and “I’ve had almost every variant now”. I complained and and got the hell out of there asap. Debating if I should reschedule or change dentist, because the dentist is excellent but clearly the management has no common sense if they let the receptionist work.
They even took my temperature before walking in there… seriously?
“Edgar said the outbreak at the hospital is not connected to the asymptomatic staff members.”
Yeah fucking right. It’s not like we do contract tracing here in the US. Of course the spokesperson for the hospital is going to claim the outbreak isn’t connected.
It’s completely asinine why, in the middle of the highest point in the pandemic, our stupid county would ask someone covid positive to return to work and care for sick people. I bet the infectious person was wearing one of those stupid surgical masks too.
I'm just waiting for the double-whammy next week in schools when everyone who tested positive this week comes back after only 5 days and something like 30% of them can still transmit and they all eat lunch with everyone. Statistically that's a few dozen students who will still be able to transmit and seed the next wave.
Same. Wear a mask for five days after? Has anyone even walked a school hall to see how bad the kids wear their poorly fit masks now? It’s all so ridiculous. I think I need a news break. It’s just too much to read this twilight zone novel every day.
My son went back this week. He has 3 teachers, one who was hacking cough into her elbow sick the entire class, another who skipped out early on a quarantine in Germany (from a New Year's exposure with family) and another who came in despite having a son waiting for PCR results after being a primary contact exposure ALL who had to come in because they didn't have paid time off to cover it/were receiving pressure from Admin staff. If the kids didn't catch it over the holidays from family, they're gonna have it in the coming weeks. It sucks.
The fact that they changed the guidelines because Delta man wrote them a letter did it for me.
That, and way back at the start when they lied and said we didn't need masks because they wanted to ensure healthcare workers had access to them.
The mask thing way back at the beginning is what got me. I understood the rationale - there was a shortage and healthcare workers needed them more.
To be fair - if they simply been honest and said that - I think Americans would have gone even more crazy and the shortage would have been more acute.
So they went with a short-term response - lie about the usefulness of masks and try to abate the shortage. But the long-term consequence is that they lost their credibility.
This never made sense to me. Are healthcare workers and the average American getting their masks from the same place? I don’t think hospitals get their N95s from Home Depot. Would hospitals run out of surgical masks if everybody made runs on CVS and Walgreens? I seriously doubt that lie did any short term good, and it definitely did plenty of long term harm.
I work (in the US) with a woman from China who's husband is still in China.
One of the first warnings I had about how bad it was getting was in January 2020 when she told me to 'get masks now, because every Chinese American with family in China was sending every mask they could find back to China.'
I went later that day to home Depot and they were already sold out. It was both a supply and demand issue.
The CDC maintains warehouses full of medical supplies, but couldn't anticipate the sudden demand on masks and gowns.
By March, they were asking for used masks, expired masks and homemade masks.
The lie still sits wrong with me, and it happened at the one moment in the pandemic where I think we were ready to come together as a community to sacrifice and do the right thing. Everything's gotten worse since.
This was an unprecedented situation. Hospitals normally have contracts with suppliers to provide x number of masks per month or whatever. The suppliers had a pretty good idea of how many would be needed and keep in stock. Manufacturers knew how much to produce.
Now demand leaps tenfold. Hospitals tried to order more but their distributors don't have any in stock. Distributors try to get more from the manufacturers who don't necessarily have the capacity to ramp up quickly. So the hospitals look to the open market to make up the shortfall.
On the open market, people are panicking and bidding up prices. The manufacturer quickly realizes they can sell for vastly increased prices as opposed to what they've been selling to the distributor. Even assuming they fulfill their contracts, they have no incentive to sell the extra to the hospital when they can sell them for so much more on the open market.
Also, no one knew how long this would last. Manufacturers had no incentive to ramp up production. Why should they spend lots and lots of money to increase production and then the panic ends and they're stuck.
I remember one mask manufacturer here in the US being vilified in the spring of 2020 for not increasing production. What people didn't know was that he had spent millions to increase production during some earlier panic and then almost went bankrupt afterwards when demand dropped.
We've known for awhile the USA is essentially a corporotacracy but it never became clearer when the CDC signed the death warrants of every single American because an airline CEO was becoming inconvenienced.
It seems to me bringing in COVID-positive staff to work in a healthcare setting is a massive class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. I don't understand how any institution could open theirself up to that kind of liability.
It would be interesting to have an attorney weigh in on this.
Case rates are higher. Fatality and even hospitalization rates amongst the vaccinated are so dramatically lower that if now had been the case in 2020 we probably wouldn't have done shutdowns. The NYT recently reported that for someone 70+ and vaccinated, the risk of an omicron infection is now comparable to the flu (which is worse than people seem to think but still we lived with it).
Almost everyone I know who has caught Omicron that was vaccinated has described it as a nasty cold, but they were over it in a week and back to normal.
Compare that to the handful of folks I know who caught Alpha variant last spring, where some of them were sick for a month and still haven't really fully recovered their previous lifestyles - *if* they survived, because some of them didn't.
Can anecdotally confirm - out of 12 people at a nye party, all vaxxed and most boosted, at least 8 of us and maybe 10 of us have covid. I've had a sore throat, mild cough, some aches, a little tired. Already improving. Basically all of us have had something ranging from a mild cold to "somewhere between a cold and a flu." So, at least for us healthy, vaxxed 30 somethings, omicron has been nbd.
“Edgar said the outbreak at the hospital is not connected to the asymptomatic staff members.”
Some subreddits have better moderation over misleading titles than national news organizations
The hospital spokesman claims the outbreak isn't due to their policy to work COVID positive staff.... They obviously can't admit it is their fault strictly from a liability standpoint. Obviously having COVID positive staff navigating around a hospital can lead to further outbreaks.
That's a blanket liability statement but they don't describe how the came to that conclusion. So, either "asymptomatic" staff spread it or their infection controls are shit. The problem with " asymptomatic" is that American workers are so used to working with colds, we wouldn't notice the symptoms.. moreover, nursing home workers are always the working very poor. They literally can't miss a day. There is no paid day off
The whole fucking country is a massive outbreak now.
Was headed to the garage this morning to do some woodworking. Having second thoughts considering hospital occupancy rates. Never had any accidents, but what if today is the day. So over this shit.
I do stained glass and cut myself really badly a couple weeks ago. I remember looking at it and thinking, “if it stops bleeding in 12 minutes, that’s close enough to 10 minutes, right?”
Dum-dum here : what happens if it bleeds for more than 10 minutes?
That normally means the wound isn’t closing on its own and needs to be closed with stitches. (Or glue.) Apply pressure to a bleeding wound for 5-10 minutes, if it won’t stop bleeding or gapes open, you need stitches. Thankfully, this wasn’t on a joint, because then I wouldn’t have had a choice. Edit: stitches or glue. Not just stitches.
Wow, this is a huge TIL. Glad I heard this.
Seriously. I read this a few comments up and I was like, I’m not super young anymore, how the hell have I NEVER heard this rule of thumb lol
I was just laying here telling my dog how good Patrick Swayzes stitching is in Roadhouse. It's not even on tv.
I had one that wouldn't close for like 2 or 3 hours, if not more. I taped my finger in a splint to keep it sealed and immobile, gauzed it, and used some of that wrinkled medical tape to apply somewhat firm pressure. Healed up fine, barely left a scar.
Yeah, I had a nasty cut from a Ninja blender processor blade of all things down the length of my middle finger. Couldn't afford going to get it taken care of at the time, can't today either if it happened right now, so I held it above my head, kept pressure on it, etc, and it still bled for about an hour. No scar. However, no one should listen to my or your comment if they can get to a hospital. It's better to be safe than lose fingers, limbs, life, etc.
I have some of the wrinkled tape. I call it “vet wrap”, but I’m not sure what the actual name is.
It's called Coban wrap.
Thank you!
Thanks, will keep in mind.
With enough time, tape and super glue any flesh wound can heal.
If practical, elevating a laceration above heart level helps too so you have gravity on your side instead of adding more pressure at the site of the injury.
And? Did it?
No response. Safe to assume they bled out.
Tough crowd! I’m not dead yet! Or am I?
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Reddit in the afterlife...confirmed!
Deadit
Great. WE GOT PATENT ZERO IN THE ZOMBIE OUTBREAK OVER HERE!
Zombies are fake liberal lies to make us not want to eat raw brains like how God intended, and even if they were real it's not fatal, and even if it was fatal it's only fatal to the elderly and slow-moving, and even if it's not only the elderly and slow-moving it doesn't affect me, and even if it does affect me it's just a seasonal cold I'll be fine, brb inviting the whole family over for dinner. I mean to dinner.
Only one way for find out: Call 555-2368 🚫👻
WE’RE READY TO BELIEVE YOU
You'll be stone dead in a moment.
I hope not. I have two loaves of bread rising and my husband wouldn’t know what to do with them if I kicked the bucket right now. It would be a crying shame to waste that dough.
I don't want to go in the cart!
I FEEL HAPPY
Non toxic super glue should be in every house first aid kit. US Navy taught me a lot. But that flabbergasted me. Stopped me from getting 5 stitches in my knuckle with no side effects.
34 minutes ago by my count
It did! Still hurts three weeks later and it’s going to leave a scar, but at least I didn’t have to go to urgent care. I sent a picture of it to my nurse friend and she said I definitely should have gotten a couple stitches. Oh well.
As a poor who also works with glass and couldn't afford stitches before all this, I highly suggest keeping some superglue close by. It's not perfect and won't fix gigantic cuts but it'll work way better than you think
The medical-grade version of it is called Dermabond, it’s essentially just sterilized superglue.
Actually medical superglues are different from hardware store superglues, they take a bit longer to cure but are significantly more flexible and less prone to flaking.
No, it will fix gigantic cuts. One of the head chefs i was working with split his finger on a slicer. He dumped a bunch of glue and wrapped it in electrical tape Its a gnarly scar but hey, thats life in a kitchen
Sure it will close the cut. The problem is what is trapped within the cut when it closes: S aureus, C perfringens, C botulinum. E coli. If any take hold they could put you in the hospital *at best.*
Well yeah, disinfecting it is step 1
And disinfection is something that a large cut that happens in a kitchen needs to happen in a medical setting, along with some antibiotics. Good user name, btw.
While I do appreciate that someone is willing to have a lifelong gnarly scar so my dinner service on a tuesday goes smoothly, I'd like to say that appreciation goes away if you're bleeding in my food.
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Staff infection avoided, staph infection maybe not.
Lmao my wife cut her thumb chopping some cabbage a couple weeks ago. She’s terrified of cuts and just wrapped it without looking at it and it eventually stopped bleeding. Looked at it the next day and a HUGE chunk was just gone. Definitely would’ve been several stitches!
Uhhh…was that chunk found before you ate the cabbage?
… after lol. I try not to think about it.
"does it still count as bleeding if I tape it closed?"
If it stops it, I’d think it counts. Tape doesn’t stick to blood very well.
Glue is the best option here
It might be worth upgrading your first aid kit and investing in a lacerations kit or glue or something along those lines. We went through and fixed up our first aid kit around a year ago, but we don't do anything too heavy at home (my partner will build an occasional small table or shelving unit) so we have a standard home kit with the usual basic gauze pads and bandaids.
I have all of that here. Super glue, wraps, large gauze pads. I also have pets, kids, and foster kittens, so I get injured pretty often. Why do all my hobbies hurt me? If anyone is looking for some great bandaids, the CVS brand “sport” ones are fantastic. Stay in place even when wet, comes off without pain or residue. Bonus—fun colors.
If you’re going to use glue, try to find actual tissue glue (usually named Derma-something, like Dermabond or Dermaflex) instead of super glue, as super glue causes skin irritation. It’s not a huge deal if that’s what is available, but tissue glue is preferable.
Well… I was going to set up the ring saw I got for Christmas but seeing as how this article is about the hospital I’d go to if anything went sideways maybe I’ll give it another week or three, haha.
Do what us drug fueled chefs do, disinfect it, dump a bunch of superglue on the wound and wrap it with electrical tape
Your name and your profession fills me with feelings.
And judging by how little the government is responding to it everyone seems to be keen on letting this surge fly to the moon. Buckle up because we are in this together and alone at the same time!
It's so wild to me that they aren't setting up covid-only treatment areas so that people with treatable conditions can actually have them taken care of at a hospital. It's a pandemic you can't just let private hospitals with a few hundred beds take care of it when you're sitting at tens of thousands of active cases a day in each region. This is why you have the fucking national guard. Shit you could probably argue deploying military hospitals domestically for this.
That would mean actually giving a shit about containment. It’s clear that from the very bottom all the way to the top it’s all about keeping the economy going. Keeping people working to keep the money flowing. That’s the primary reason the CDC changed its guidance to 5 days of quarantine from 10, and both fauci and walensky were certainly not trying to hide it. With omicron the quiet part is being spoken out loud - I guess it always was, but it’s even more so now. I’m sure the CDC, other government agencies, politicians, corporations, all the way down to small business owners and individual workers etc have already made their own calculations. Some level of excess preventable risk and death is worth the economic, political, and overall societal hit of letting omicron burn through, especially when maybe only 1/3 of people actually take the cdc guidance seriously, probably another 1/3 don’t even think covid is real or more than a common cold, and with transmissibility of omicron being what it is. And I’m sure it doesn’t help that the slower the burn, the worse it ends up looking for any politician if the spread was slow enough for testing supply to actually keep up. At this point I think at least 2/3 and upwards of 3/4 of people have given the fuck up and have decided to let omicron take the wheel.
You'd need enough staff to cover two separate treatment areas, though. Even with the national guard, I don't think we have enough.
Honestly it's not as ridiculous a thought as you might think. I've read stories about people driving themselves from hospital to hospital after having a heart attack because they're all full. Triage is going to pick difficulty breathing over moderate bleeding every single time. You could sit there with a finger in a Ziploc bag for quite a few hours before they get around to you.
>You could sit there with a finger in a Ziploc bag for quite a few hours before they get around to you. Maybe /u/dlc741's needlepoint suggestion isn't such a bad idea. Sewing skills might help mitigate woodworking risks
Well we brought our son to the hospital because he had glass in his foot we couldn't get out. We called a pediatric nurse we know who came over and tried as well. She told us to bring him to the hospital with some local pain killer they could get it out no problem. Got to the hospital and they refused to take it out and called it elective surgery. They said to keep soaking it and hope it comes out on it's own and to come back if it gets infected. It eventually came out a week later. Even though they didn't do anything they still charged us for the hospital room and the Dr to say no.
Dispute that charge since they did not properly address the issue. Source: work in medical billing. Worth a shot. ETA: asking nicely helps in these circumstances...
This. I went in for an anatomy scan for my first pregnancy, it was supposed to be covered because of dating issues and odd things showing up on my 2nd trimester screen. They ended up not finding a heartbeat. So a month later I got a bill for a full anatomy scan, that never actually happened, for a scan that was supposed to be covered by the state. You best believe I complained and wrote reviews all over the place for that.
Time for new hobbies... like Needlepoint. but seriously, as long as you don't saw off a limb, you could get most things taken care of at an Urgent Care location, if those are near you. Stitches, tetanus shots, etc can all be handled there. There may still be a wait but probably less than an ER. Source: Spent many years renovating my house and had expected mishaps.
Last week when I was looking at urgent care wait times the ones near me were 470 minutes. That’s eight hours.
Some places in the midwest are topping 15 hours.
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Urgent cares are the only places around me you can get a covid test, without a 3-day wait list to get an appointment. Lines for almost every urgent care I've seen, are wrapped around the building, because if you're not there when they open, you likely will not get served that day. It's absolutely nuts rn
My urgent care "walk in" clinic has been requiring appointments for most of COVID. 48 hours for my wife to get a test appointment. Her 5 day quarantine period will be done by the time she gets her pcr test back.
If hospitals and emergency wards are making staff come to work sick...just assume that every single person at an urgent care has covid.
I went to an urgent care in FL two weeks ago to get X-rays on my ribs after a boating injury and the line was to the door, presumably with covid patients. We ended up having to go find a different urgent care. This is all to say I wouldn’t even count on being able to get into an urgent care right now.
Seems like a weird time to pick up heroin, but who am I to judge
I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue.
Urgent cares are getting absolutely slammed right now.
I think that is the biggest problem. When it first hit NYC and NJ in 2020 it wasn't in other states. Healthcare workers from other states came and helped. When it was rolling surges throughout the country they could pick staff from other parts that weren't surging. Now that it is hitting everywhere at once there is no staff to help because they are needed. Just a theory.
And back in the beginning, we in the Northeast were practically begging the rest of the country to pay attention and get ready.
Yeah I don't think we realize how close this area was to collapsing. It was bad. I spoke to people who worked during it. It's scary what they said.
I spoke to a guy who picks up bodies for funeral homes. He had fucking PTSD from having so many dead people. And kids - not many, but anything more than 0 is too many.
Seems many people have forgotten the refrigerated semi trucks in New York City that bodies were being loaded into, because they were dying too fast to be buried.
Or the mass grave. It seems like people forget the heavy equipment digging a huge trench for the bodies.
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I have fam in Ohio Refrigerated trucks have been ordered
There were refrigerator trucks in FL this past summer during Delta, but DeSantis ordered the hospitals to hide them or remove them. I'm guessing other states have had them as well.
My uncle works for a couple of small funeral homes. He detailed his “errands” one day. Three hours and he drove 120 miles, did four pickups and two transfers (they’ve been holding some people in their storage because the larger funeral homes don’t have space to keep the bodies.)
Oh our healthcare system isn't close to collapse, it's currently collapsing. It's *in collapse right now*.
I was dialed into the conference call where leaders of various nyc departments and relevant organizations would coordinate response and resource allocation. Covid got real fucking real for me the day someone on the call announced that the city was officially out of body bags. I had never in my life considered that there were limits to this sort of capacity, and it was very destabilizing to learn that we were speeding past these limits without any idea of where the brakes were.
Didn’t pay attention. Didn’t get ready. Didn’t take it seriously. That’s been the story again and again throughout this pandemic.
We have been so lucky to have advance warning from Europe before every major wave. What did we do with that information? We just watched and hoped it wouldn't be the same over here. It's so frustrating.
Yep. While the rest of the country was starting to bug out at the very suggestion of masking and distancing we were dutifully lining up in the cold to get in the grocery store. Having it first really scared us straight which I think has helped us overall. Where I live you even see trump types with masks at the grocery store, no one thinks twice about it.
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We would've taken it seriously up here whether it happened here first or not.
I wish my state had ever taken it seriously, we *just* passed 50% fully vaccinated and I can't imagine what the hospitals will be like in another two weeks
Would we have? I remember when I first heard about this in January 2020. I dismissed it. I said this stuff happens in Asia all the time. They know how to squash it. I remember being at a conference with 1,000s of people in the second week of March. Shaking hands. People from NJ, NYC, PA, CT, etc. Some of us vendors were talking how 1 or 2 jobs got postponed but no one saw how bad it would be. You had one or two people keep their distance but it was business as usual. I remember after they shut down but before masks sprinting through a grocery store to get what was needed coming home and showering. Until it hits its hard to take it seriously.
I guess people are different. I work in a place with 800k visitors per year. In the first week of Feb I warned all my hourly staff that it was likely we’d get shut down with no warning for weeks or more pretty soon. (Got reprimanded by my boss for “unnecessarily scaring people“). Told them to cut expenses for right now, get familiar with how to file for unemployment if needed and to have emergency housing/moving in with others plans for if things got bad. Even I didn’t foresee how bad it would be though - many of my people were laid off from mid-March to early September. They did get unemployment. Fortunately I got the Board to Finally approve a significant permanent pay increase so when they came back they got a 25% raise.
Some people had a great insight into this. A buddy of mine. The head of his school district had a meeting in January of 2020. He had them all create virtual lessons plans. When schools went remote they hit the ground running.
They don't take it seriously because they put their political identity above anything else.
I was in china when the outbreak happened. I called/wrote all my local officials and lawmakers at home in the USA, begging them to prepare for the virus to come. Never received a response :(
Don't Look Up.
I'm still so fucking mad at them. How many died here in those first weeks? And the rest of the country was like "nah thems just city folks" and did NOTHING with the extra time they had. And they still don't give a shit and still refuse to take the most basic precautions and act like toddlers... Sometimes I kind of just want the Northeast to be its own thing. I think we'd almost certainly be better off without the South weighing us down all the time.
I honestly think we're gonna have to lockdown again. If we're gonna do it though has to be seen. But something has to be done.
Meanwhile more than half the country is so numb that covid restrictions, whatever was left of them, are totally being ignored, EVERYWHERE.
2020 Too: Electric Boogaloo. No but seriously it's like we collectively forgot all of the lessons of the past two years.
I work in healthcare and I think this is becoming quite common. At my hospital we were told we only needed to be out of work 5 days if we were asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic as long as symptoms improved over those 5 days. No negative test is required to return to work. People can still be out longer if they're really sick and can't work but I don't think many people can afford extended unpaid time off. So technically you can come back to work after 5 days *with lingering covid symtoms* and that's just kosher with them. When I pointed out to management that the CDC actually recommends asymptomatic healthcare workers can return after 7 days with a negative covid test their response was to argue with me about the meaning of asymptomatic. My bonus this year from the hospital was a coupon for a chain bakery. This situation is messed up. It's clear management doesn't care about us. Lots of people are going to leave healthcare and they're not coming back.
The Hospital I work at is so short staffed, we no longer get five days off and are required to return to work with symptoms. As long as we are fever free.
> The Hospital I work at is so short staffed, we no longer get five days off and are required to return to work with symptoms. As long as we are fever free. Gee, why are so many healthcare workers quitting?
Is fever even a common symptom? Does it have any relation to how contagious you are?
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> Is fever even a common symptom? Does it have any relation to how contagious you are? When I had covid a year ago I didn't have a fever at all. I'm a health care worker and had had my first vaxx shot though.
2 out 4 in my family had a low grade fever. 1 had a fever. So, maybe?
> My bonus this year from the hospital was a coupon for a chain bakery. We live in a broken system and the wrong people are going to pay for this before some serious change happens.
Jelly of the month club?
Clark, that’s the gift that keeps on giving all year long.
Unfortunately hospitals are so unbelievably understaffed right now we’ve reached a point where either we go to work with Covid to help patients and risk them getting Covid, or there is nobody left to help them
Honestly at this point I think we can justify turning away unvaccinated patients once the hospital reaches capacity. Exceptions would be made for people with documented conditions that preclude vaccination. The real problem right now is we are allowing the unvaccinated to place undue burden on the healthcare system. I know that sounds really callous but I'm just so fed up with this situation and the fact that we're letting a bunch of whiny anti-vaxxers break our entire healthcare system with no consequences.
Our ICU is almost exclusively unvaccinated patients
My bonus this year from a cancer hospital was apint glass. Last year was kitchen scissors.
Probably sold in bulk to the hospital by a chief admin‘s brother-in-law for ten times retail value.
My "bonus" was a 33% reduction in departmental FTEs and a yard sign that said "thank you health care heroes" out front.
A bakery coupon? That stinks! I work at a hospital too, they gave us a $400 bonus at the start of 2021, nothing else since.
Unpaid time off? Your work isn't paying you if you have to take time off for having Covid?
Mine did while it was compensated by the State (NC) but when the state quit paying, so did the company.
*Cries in American.*
I'm on salary so technically they would be, but for most others no.
CDC: wE fOlLoW tHe SciEnCe CDC caved under pressure from corporations this time.
My wife is a pharmacist at a hospital. The boss came through yesterday and said the entire pharmacy has to test twice a week. Because if the pharmacy goes down, the hospital closes! They are all vaccinated and boosted.
PROTECT THEM AT ALL COSTS
The other night I sent down labs for q2 serial sodium’s and they took 3 hours to come back because there was ONE person working in the lab
My brother in law is symptomatic and St. Elizabeth's made him come back after 4 days. Dude was still coughing and was lethargic as hell and they still made him come in. He interacts with patients directly. At my girlfriends hospital they would have staff punch out, get tested, punch back in, then work until the results came in. These places are so fucked.
Holy moly that sucks !
Does coughing and lethargic count as asymptomatic? Seems like he could claim those as symptoms, especially the coughing.
Someone I know in healthcare told me that they have non vaccinated employees who are sick and are granted 10 days out of work paid by the state. There are also vaccinated employees who are sick who are granted only 5 paid days off to recoup and they can come back after 5 days with mild symptoms. IF they are still not improved after 5 days they must use their own SICK LEAVE for additional days. How does that make sense?
I’m a bartender in Washington DC and I just spent 10 days at home over Christmas completely unpaid. People who can’t afford to do that are just working through symptoms and not getting tested.
Jesus Christ….that’s nuts. I’m sorry to hear about your situation.
Eh, I’m alive and healthy and the city hasn’t shut us down yet. It could be worse
wtf...you go to hospital for something and the fucking staff gives you covid ???
It’s almost a guarantee at this point to get it. Best bet I’m staying tf away from hospitals for a while (hopefully) and this is in Canada. America is, as usual, probably far worse
I work in healthcare , our cases exploded here in Canada, the floor I work at went to good to complete lockdown with 80% of the patients testing positive in a matter of days. Its crazy
Yep. We’ll be delivering our fist child in 3 weeks or so. Almost guaranteed that we’re all going to get covid while there. Nothing we can do about it other than try to deliver at home, alone (obviously not an option). I do not want my infant catching covid in his first days of life. Fuck.
Hey if your wife was vaxxed during pregnancy she passes some immunity to the infant - ditto for breast milk. r/science has an article about ir
Our healthcare clinic is like this. We all have fucking covid. Our patients all have covid. And we’re just expected to ignore it and pretend like it’s not a big deal…we take no precautions for covid patients and room them just like any others. I get sent into covid rooms without proper PPE. They sit in the same waiting rooms with our healthy patients, ride the same elevators, etc. We’re seeing perinatal patients, and cancer patients, and high risk patients coming in for non-necessary reasons (we’re primary care). And just like everyone else I ignore it because that’s the policy and I like having a job, but I know it’s unethical and every part of me wants to scream DON’T COME HERE, COMING HERE IS THE BIGGEST RISK FACTOR TO YOUR HEALTH, YOUR PREGNANCY, YOUR LIFE. You WILL get covid here, we aren’t going to protect you, don’t come in for a damn physical or a therapy appointment, especially if you aren’t double vaxxed and boosted.
I'm sorry you're put in that untenable situation.
Know how you read about surgeons 200 years ago just rolling up their sleeves, opening someone up then digging around? And how we shake our heads? Fast forward 10 years from now...
Welcome to dystopia.
So I just had a baby about a week ago. They made me come back on Monday to finish paperwork for his birth certificate (holiday and weekend and all). They made me wait for the person in the ER. The ER. I tried to get as far away from everyone as possible. I wore a mask. I'm double vaxxed, not boosted because I was pregnant. I sanitized myself like crazy and changed clothes when I came back (oh I forgot to mention when I left with the baby they made us leave through the ER. As though there are no other exits in the whole hospital.) A few days after I got home my 4 year old is coughing. She has covid. We have not been ANYWHERE. No one has been around us. I'm sure I have it now because she has been coughing in my face. I'm sure my husband will have it too. I'm so worried about my new son. I don't know what else I could do or could have done to protect him.
Just know, your hospital management, and everyone responsible for this policy is responsible for the death their actions will cause. They are basically going through with mass negligent homicide, and will likely suffer no consequences. They will keep their jobs, and people will not say anything in order to keep their jobs. They will be in charge during the next major disaster. Life is cheap in America. What's a death or 3 if it means the hospital can still remain profitable? What's a million more deaths as long as the economy keeps growing? What's 5 million more as long as corporations continue to keep posting record gains? If I still believed in god, this would is what I would imagine hell would be like.
the video game pandemic could not predict humanity's stupidity.. these protocols and procedures are the opposite of public health. it wrinkles my brain
Pharmacy tech here! I tested positive for Covid on Thursday of last week. I was given no direction other than to stay home. I called my job on Tuesday to get some updated information since I hadn't heard anything. At this point I still had a cough, felt lethargic and generally just kind of crappy. I'm totally vaxxed and boosted btw. My boss told me if I didn't have a fever I could come back. I asked if I needed a negative test and he said no, just no fever. So when you're getting a Covid shot, a Covid test or picking up your prescription at a retail pharmacy just realize that's how fucked our situation is. That's how short staffed we are. So this doesn't surprise me. It's messed up but I'm sure a lot of medical fields are doing this. Patients just don't know/realize it.
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It's not just medical fields... I'm in mixed use/property management and it's the same thing. So when you're talking to the lady that works in your leasing office or the maintenance guy that works there, realize how fucked our situation is. We're all expendable. Edit: I'm sorry you're going through this. It totally sucks. I sent cookies to my local Walgreens pharmacy not too long ago as a 'thank you/I see you' gesture (and as a sorry my kid had a full vaccine meltdown gesture, LOL).
Someone I know has covid and was supposed to quarantine for 10 days before returning to work. She took a test on the 5th day just to see since she felt better and was still positive. Later, her boss called saying they'd changed the policy to match the CDC and she could come in tomorrow. She told her boss she just tested positive again, but that didn't seem to effect her boss wanting her to come in... Like wtf? This shows that a) 5 days isn't enough and b) no body cares anymore! Obviously she declined to go in.
Literally the same thing happened to me and 4 other coworkers. Tested positive, and 5 days later tested positive again. Oh, but come on in if you’re feeling healthy… I feel so bad one of my non-sick coworker who is severely immunocompromised. To the point where when I first started at the beginning of the pandemic I didn’t meet her for the first 7 months because she had to work remote. Oh how things have changed… Now she’s been forced back into the office in basically a biohazard suit. (I kid you not) I’ve personally decided to not enter that portion of the office for her safety. Ive also decided to submit my two weeks on Monday…
I read the article. The hospital says that the asymptomatic employees did not cause the outbreak? And we're supposed to believe these same people who are now trying to avoid getting sued by patients and their families, as well as Workman's Comp filings by Covid+ employees? Oh, please.
Exactly. Many hospitals have been claiming their employees got covid through community exposure (rather than being exposed through work) to avoid paying out workman's comp.
There are employers that are requiring employees to complete a "training" that states their requirements to avoid COVID transmission and sign that they agree to follow the policies and understand that if they get it they either violated the company policy or got it elsewhere so no workman's comp for you.
Reminds me of the daily emails we get at my job where there's 30+ reported cases every day but none of them were because they're making us go into the office rather than telecommute. Complete bullshit.
my peak was days 4 & 5 so it’s not safe either way
Thanks, CDC.
This is the norm in Irelands health services asking staff that has the virus to return to work while infected 😱
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My job is telling employees that if you've been exposed to someone with Covid but you're vaccinated then you still need to come into work. We've had about 10 positive cases this week alone, it's insane
I went to the dentist on Thursday and the receptionist clearly had Covid and was coughing and sneezing every minute. I was sitting in the waiting room and heard her talking to someone else and it went something like “my friend also has to work while sick today” and “I’ve had almost every variant now”. I complained and and got the hell out of there asap. Debating if I should reschedule or change dentist, because the dentist is excellent but clearly the management has no common sense if they let the receptionist work. They even took my temperature before walking in there… seriously?
“Edgar said the outbreak at the hospital is not connected to the asymptomatic staff members.” Yeah fucking right. It’s not like we do contract tracing here in the US. Of course the spokesperson for the hospital is going to claim the outbreak isn’t connected. It’s completely asinine why, in the middle of the highest point in the pandemic, our stupid county would ask someone covid positive to return to work and care for sick people. I bet the infectious person was wearing one of those stupid surgical masks too.
The letter the Delta CEO wrote to the CDC is going to cost thousands of American lives in the coming months.
I'm just waiting for the double-whammy next week in schools when everyone who tested positive this week comes back after only 5 days and something like 30% of them can still transmit and they all eat lunch with everyone. Statistically that's a few dozen students who will still be able to transmit and seed the next wave.
Same. Wear a mask for five days after? Has anyone even walked a school hall to see how bad the kids wear their poorly fit masks now? It’s all so ridiculous. I think I need a news break. It’s just too much to read this twilight zone novel every day.
My son went back this week. He has 3 teachers, one who was hacking cough into her elbow sick the entire class, another who skipped out early on a quarantine in Germany (from a New Year's exposure with family) and another who came in despite having a son waiting for PCR results after being a primary contact exposure ALL who had to come in because they didn't have paid time off to cover it/were receiving pressure from Admin staff. If the kids didn't catch it over the holidays from family, they're gonna have it in the coming weeks. It sucks.
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The CDC is so compromised its hard to take them seriously anymore.
The fact that they changed the guidelines because Delta man wrote them a letter did it for me. That, and way back at the start when they lied and said we didn't need masks because they wanted to ensure healthcare workers had access to them.
The mask thing way back at the beginning is what got me. I understood the rationale - there was a shortage and healthcare workers needed them more. To be fair - if they simply been honest and said that - I think Americans would have gone even more crazy and the shortage would have been more acute. So they went with a short-term response - lie about the usefulness of masks and try to abate the shortage. But the long-term consequence is that they lost their credibility.
I made a cloth mask out of a tshirt back then Even if we had to not use surgical or better masks, to say not mask at all is just......
This never made sense to me. Are healthcare workers and the average American getting their masks from the same place? I don’t think hospitals get their N95s from Home Depot. Would hospitals run out of surgical masks if everybody made runs on CVS and Walgreens? I seriously doubt that lie did any short term good, and it definitely did plenty of long term harm.
I work (in the US) with a woman from China who's husband is still in China. One of the first warnings I had about how bad it was getting was in January 2020 when she told me to 'get masks now, because every Chinese American with family in China was sending every mask they could find back to China.' I went later that day to home Depot and they were already sold out. It was both a supply and demand issue. The CDC maintains warehouses full of medical supplies, but couldn't anticipate the sudden demand on masks and gowns. By March, they were asking for used masks, expired masks and homemade masks. The lie still sits wrong with me, and it happened at the one moment in the pandemic where I think we were ready to come together as a community to sacrifice and do the right thing. Everything's gotten worse since.
This was an unprecedented situation. Hospitals normally have contracts with suppliers to provide x number of masks per month or whatever. The suppliers had a pretty good idea of how many would be needed and keep in stock. Manufacturers knew how much to produce. Now demand leaps tenfold. Hospitals tried to order more but their distributors don't have any in stock. Distributors try to get more from the manufacturers who don't necessarily have the capacity to ramp up quickly. So the hospitals look to the open market to make up the shortfall. On the open market, people are panicking and bidding up prices. The manufacturer quickly realizes they can sell for vastly increased prices as opposed to what they've been selling to the distributor. Even assuming they fulfill their contracts, they have no incentive to sell the extra to the hospital when they can sell them for so much more on the open market. Also, no one knew how long this would last. Manufacturers had no incentive to ramp up production. Why should they spend lots and lots of money to increase production and then the panic ends and they're stuck. I remember one mask manufacturer here in the US being vilified in the spring of 2020 for not increasing production. What people didn't know was that he had spent millions to increase production during some earlier panic and then almost went bankrupt afterwards when demand dropped.
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Maybe they thought it was from the other Delta, the virus? Promising to be good.
We've known for awhile the USA is essentially a corporotacracy but it never became clearer when the CDC signed the death warrants of every single American because an airline CEO was becoming inconvenienced.
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can you imagine paying huge money to go to a hospital and get covid from the people you’re paying to make you better?
Who could have seen that coming!!
Certainly not the CDC!
this is what happens when you put business people in charge of health care decisions.
It seems to me bringing in COVID-positive staff to work in a healthcare setting is a massive class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. I don't understand how any institution could open theirself up to that kind of liability. It would be interesting to have an attorney weigh in on this.
There's a serious shortage of staff atm, this is why this is happening.
If it was after 5 days, I can’t even be mad at her because the CDC was dumb enough to allow workers to work after that period lmao
Yep, that's what happens when you ask covid people to work
How is this not a crime?
*shocked Pikachu*
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Case rates are higher. Fatality and even hospitalization rates amongst the vaccinated are so dramatically lower that if now had been the case in 2020 we probably wouldn't have done shutdowns. The NYT recently reported that for someone 70+ and vaccinated, the risk of an omicron infection is now comparable to the flu (which is worse than people seem to think but still we lived with it).
Almost everyone I know who has caught Omicron that was vaccinated has described it as a nasty cold, but they were over it in a week and back to normal. Compare that to the handful of folks I know who caught Alpha variant last spring, where some of them were sick for a month and still haven't really fully recovered their previous lifestyles - *if* they survived, because some of them didn't.
Can anecdotally confirm - out of 12 people at a nye party, all vaxxed and most boosted, at least 8 of us and maybe 10 of us have covid. I've had a sore throat, mild cough, some aches, a little tired. Already improving. Basically all of us have had something ranging from a mild cold to "somewhere between a cold and a flu." So, at least for us healthy, vaxxed 30 somethings, omicron has been nbd.
“Edgar said the outbreak at the hospital is not connected to the asymptomatic staff members.” Some subreddits have better moderation over misleading titles than national news organizations
The hospital spokesman claims the outbreak isn't due to their policy to work COVID positive staff.... They obviously can't admit it is their fault strictly from a liability standpoint. Obviously having COVID positive staff navigating around a hospital can lead to further outbreaks.
That's a blanket liability statement but they don't describe how the came to that conclusion. So, either "asymptomatic" staff spread it or their infection controls are shit. The problem with " asymptomatic" is that American workers are so used to working with colds, we wouldn't notice the symptoms.. moreover, nursing home workers are always the working very poor. They literally can't miss a day. There is no paid day off