Pandemic Era Issues

[kk]

I don't want to spam the other boards, talking about pandemic issues all the time, so I made a new thread! I realize I spam the ooc boards a bit and apreciate all who read. Oddly at times MSB can be like a safe space to express some feelings. Sometimes it is a bit like like journeling where others can read. I think the mushing community is often very suportive abou real life issues. Sometimes even mushers who dont get along over games are supportive when it comes to real life troubles, which is great.

Anyways so I made a board for us to talk specifically about our pandemic issues, be it having covid, family with covid, job situations in the pandemic and etc.

But I also though by seperating if anyone is sick of hearing about it or burnt out on pandemic talk, they are can just not read the thread.

[kk]

So I did 5 days straight and was all stressed out. I am getting more effected by stress at work than I was last winter. Our staffing shortage is much worse. Our covid rates were I am are real low though so that is good. But just the stress of endlessly being short staffed and working so much. I think to there was like a rush that gave me energy to work alot and with that rush fading, but the need not fading, there is an exhaustion. I am not alone in this, lots of the nurses and nurse's aids I work with report the same. Some are leaving the medical field over it.

While I understand the reason for the vaccine mandate and absolutely have no desire to get into the politics of such, so I vote we don't go there. And I am not arguing against such.

I am stressed because some of the nurses were I work are going to leave over mandates and our staffing is about to get worse. Many are agency nurses and now the whole country will be fighting for agency nurses as the number of them gets even lower. I am fully vaccinated and plan to stay nursing and to follow any vaccine mandates. But what is going down the line in turns of nursing shortages has me pretty frightened for my patients, for my workplace for the whole country and for myself.

My anxiety is super high and has been also effecting my mushing.

I have 3 days off straight and I need them so bad. I got asked to come today and I said no. I don't normally say no. But I just can't keep going and going, coming in all the time. I already did like 60 hours. I don't need to over 70 hours right now.

But on the other hand I feel sort of gulity too, like they really need me. So I feel bad for saying no and yet I feel like I have to pace myself if I am going to make through this coming storm. This fall and winter are going to be a shit show.

[kk]

And then another thing has me stressed is the vaccinaed vs unvacccinated.

Again don't want to get into the right/left politics if possible.

But there are people going...oh we should not give medical care to anyone who isn't vaccinated. I am no we should give medical care to everyone who needs it. And there are people cheering when unvaccinated people die. And I feel like cheering on people dieing and suffering is messed up.

Then on the other side, I have people going the vaccine is a weapon of genocide and you are all going to die and should quit your jobs before you take it. And when they here someone vaccinated is sick, they are cheering it on. It feel ill that people are wanting the vaccinated to die in order to prove a point.

And it is making me so so anxious and depressed to hear this. I don't think its right to cheer about anyone getting sick with covid and suffering, regardless of their vaccine status.

The world is broken.

[Arkandel]

@kk said in Pandemic Era Issues:

But there are people going...oh we should not give medical care to anyone who isn't vaccinated.

That's a bit of a dilemma. There are other medical conditions caused by people doing something wrong - do we not treat patients for cancer who refuse to give up smoking, for example?

I'm still of the opinion insurance premiums should be much higher for unvaccinated patients. Perhaps also prioritizing ER beds accordingly if it means people left are left untreated who don't have Covid-19.

Either way the medical sector is struggling badly to keep up with demand these days.

[kk]

@arkandel

I took an oath when I graduated from nursing school and I take that oath extremely seriously. I would never deny someone medical care based on their life choices.

Allthough, it is true that medical system is overwhelmed. I think more so than many realize and I think it is about to get worse.

[Derp]

@arkandel said in Pandemic Era Issues:

There are other medical conditions caused by people doing something wrong - do we not treat patients for cancer who refuse to give up smoking, for example?

I think there is a fundamental difference here, though. When you refuse to give up smoking when being treated for cancer, you're ultimately only hurting yourself. We can get into debates about the dangers of secondhand smoke, or whatever, but ultimately, COVID is much more lethal in the very short term and can affect a great many more people, including the network of exposure that it creates.

This is actively endangering other people, and there are good faith arguments to be made that the maximum good, and the maximum amount of lives saved, would be best served by refusing treatment if they refuse the most effective treatment in favor of continuing to endanger others while putting a strain on a medical profession that is already stretched to its limit. This is no different from any other sort of battlefield triage, just stretched over a longer timescale.

While I'm never going to actively cheer the deaths of the willfully unvaccinated, especially when it's widely available and free, I have absolutely zero sympathy for them. You made your choices.

[Sunny]

I'm tired of the death. I've been steeped in it for two years, being part of a small community with a lot of health challenges. We haven't gotten back to the devastation of last summer (it seemed like there was a funeral every week; we had to stop closing for them), but it's just...bad, still. Today's loss hit really, really hard.

My community has a long history of being very distrustful of power, so I can't really....I can't blame anybody there for not being vaccinated. The tribe is TRYING to encourage it, but when you have people in their remembered history -- some of it during some of these folks' LIVES, like, CURRENT history for them -- who WERE killed by "medical intervention" that wasn't, I'd be wary too, and so it's really rough to see the whole "they should be left to suffer" thing. The fear some of these communities have is valid and real and comes from what the US government did to them within the last hundred years. This isn't shit they learned in a textbook, but in their very real lives.

I just want people to stop dying. I want to make it through more than a week or two without being asked if I'm sitting down, or stumbling across info unexpectedly, or a closure for a funeral, or--

just. that's all. It's so hard.

[Arkandel]

I think - or fear - that living during a pandemic might be something we will just all... need to do.

Even assuming high vaccination rates in the western world - which is by no means a given there are millions of people worldwide who don't have access to that level of care. Until that happens Covid-19 is here to stay. Any traveler can transmit it.

I don't see us getting rid of mask mandates and we'll probably need to be vaccinated more in the future to maintain a strong immune response or even to cover potential new strains. We're at least at a good place given our mRNA tech.

If nothing else the issue will be collective fatigue. Everyone is tired of this shit. We need to keep being responsible but it's hard. And it won't get easier.

[Rinel]

@arkandel

And at some point kids just have to go to school. I don't have answers beyond vaccine mandates, which are legal in the US and which I've ended up becoming a supporter of.

[Tinuviel]

@rinel said in Pandemic Era Issues:

which are legal in the US

Not only legal, but pretty damn common all over the Western world.

[faraday]

@derp said in Pandemic Era Issues:

This is actively endangering other people

That isn’t supposed to matter in medicine either. I’m a paramedic not a doctor so the whole Hippocratic oath thing doesn’t apply, but our medical ethics are to treat all patients the same devoid of moral judgment. The drunk driver gets the same standard of care as his victims, even if we have to grit our teeth while doing it.

Now when the system is overwhelmed and you have to triage who can be saved, there’s an argument to be made that maybe the vaccinated would have better outcomes, all else being equal. But that’s debatable and complicated (vaccinated old person with a laundry list of medical conditions vs a young otherwise healthy unvaccinated person for instance).

It just sucks that this has to be such a divisive issue

[saosmash]

Nurses leaving because they refuse to get vaccinated breaks my heart in two. I honestly struggle to even comprehend it. I'm so sorry that this situation exists and that it is weighing on you.

I've had at least one social worker quit over the state vaccine mandate here, and it's thrown some things into a bit of chaos, but we're not... you know, medical professionals. I'm not religious and rarely pray but I thanked G-d for science and human ingenuity when the vaccines came out. I thought it was the beginning of the end of this hideous mess.

Should never, ever, ever have become a politically divisive issue in the first place.

[Derp]

@faraday said in Pandemic Era Issues:

That isn’t supposed to matter in medicine either.

And people aren't supposed to refuse safe treatments to save their lives, either, but this is the world we live in now. I get that people take medical ethics seriously. I work in a profession with serious ethics rules, too. But I think that the people who can be vaccinated and refuse are stretching the limits of ethics to their breaking point.

I don't know what else to say to people. If you won't get two free shots in the arm to avoid spreading a plague to hundreds, or potentially thousands, of people, knowing full well that bad outcomes happen every day, then you've decided to roll the dice with fate not just for yourself, but for everyone around you.

The drunk driver would be criminally prosecuted and forced to make amends, but the person that refused a vaccination and spreads a disease to all those other people will never be held accountable for the lives that they cost.

No sympathy.

[faraday]

@derp said in Pandemic Era Issues:

And people aren't supposed to refuse safe treatments to save their lives, either, but this is the world we live in now.

That's always been the world we lived in. You have medical autonomy to refuse any and all treatments for any and all reasons, no matter how idiotic. Can't count the number of times someone has signed a refusal form to avoid being taken to the hospital in our ambulance despite us pleading with them that they're at risk of death.

Believe me, I'm as frustrated as you are. And I'm all for using every weapon in the arsenal to persuade these people, from vaccine mandates to bribery to education... whatever it takes to end this nightmare.

But I'm not in favor of doctors deciding who lives and who dies based on their own moral judgment of someone's behavior. That is a horrific idea.

[Ganymede]

@faraday said in Pandemic Era Issues:

But I'm not in favor of doctors deciding who lives and who dies based on their own moral judgment of someone's behavior. That is a horrific idea.

Or who is insured. Not that it has ever been an issue, no.

I have zero sympathy for folks, though.

I mean, folks in general.

Fuck people.

[Arkandel]

The other issue here is that we're on pretty uncharted territory. Anyone who says they have a good even mid-term plan is wrong or a liar; we simply don't know how things will turn out.

But look, there are football stadiums packed full of people right now. That isn't going to end well. And the virus doesn't give a damn about politics, opinions or rights, it just spreads.

What I find utterly baffling is how easy it is for people to let their own stubbornness blind them to obvious facts.

Soldiers refusing vaccines? For decades vaccinations were mandatory. You got into just about any military force in the world and got in line to get 5-6 different needles in you, no idea what was in each and no questions asked. Now it's a problem?

Or travel. But mah freedoms! Well for decades if you wanted to get to certain places you needed to get vaccinated. Schools? Same thing.

Or masks. Mask aversion? "Face diapers"? Oxygen deprivation? Doctors and nurses have been wearing them for decades and no one batted an eyelash, now it's an issue?

But you know what? If there was some mastermind behind all this profiting somehow from the campaign against vaccines or masks I'd at least... feel relieved. It'd be intentional. However no, that's not the case - we are just that stupid. We're just doing it to ourselves for no damn reason.

[Testament]

To all the unvaccinated dying of Covid and taking up spaces for people with cancer and other diseases and literally being turned away because there's no room?

I've been working in a Covid lab for going on two years. My compassion and sympathy have long since run out.

[mietze]

@arkandel I don't think there's one mastermind, but there's a lot of people making $$$ from anti-vax, don't trust the government/science, here try this crazy ass shit instead of real medicine, and religious fervor. I think maybe the mundane people are seeing this out in full force because of the pandemic, but there's been grooming towards this for a very very very long time now. I feel sad that the people it is affecting the most are the least equipped to be able to handle it.

[TNP]

By all means, treat the unvaccinated if they come down with it. We're not barbarians to refuse medical treatment to someone who needs it.

However, as they are asking for it, they should pay for it. No free medical care for the adults who don't have a valid medical reason to refuse vaccination.

[Tinuviel]

One thing I'll never understand is how these screeching ninnies managed to convince people not to take the vaccine because they don't know what's in it, but to take ivermectin... which they clearly also don't know anything about.