It looks like the Fall Surge is coming

Difference is perhaps warm or cool weather when the protests started shortly after Memorial Day. I guarantee that no one wore their mask non-stop marching 2 miles in high heat and high humidity in Houston when they had their largest protest of 60,000 people. You see a lot more protesters without masks or with their masks under their noses in the southern states, where the spikes started across the south 10-14 days after protests started.

But we've had this discussion how many dozens to times before?

 

Hahaha. It's nice when politicians admit the truth, while making political excuses for their failures. This virus started out serious since no one knew what to expect, but now that it's dying down and mortality rates have decreased significantly, "It's all politics".

Oh no. We did really well and anyone who says we did poorly is just being political. Cuomo. What a hoot!

 

Another clarification regarding the ridiculous idea that doctors over-report Covid-19 deaths for money. It's been said that if someone dies of a car crash and happens to be an asymptomatic case of Covid-19 the doctor will report the death as caused by Covid-19 to get more money which is utterly and profoundly absurd, for three good reasons:

1. Hospitals and doctors billing goes by procedures and materials, not diagnosis. The diagnosis is entered to justify the procedures, but what an itemized bill shows is say, this many doses of an antibiotic, operation room fees, surgeon's time, how many bags of IV fluids were used, and so on. Care delivered to someone who dies of complications of a surgery as opposed to Covid-19 wouldn't be more billable for the sake of the diagnosing the person instead, with a death by Covid-19.

2. A small fund was set up by Medicare under the CARES act to compensate hospitals for true Covid-19 care of uninsured patients (by the way, the fund has dried out already). To falsify a death certificate in other to access those funds would be tremendously complicated. So, say, you had a patient coming in with major trauma from a car crash, with broken ribs and ruptured liver with internal hemorrhage; pray tell, how do you falsify that to pretend that Covid-19 caused these lesions??? "Well, see, Medicare auditor, this virus is so nasty that he broke the patient's rib and ruptured his liver, that's why we need to be compensated through this fund, for the blood transfusion, the rib-cage stabilization, and the operation to suture his liver, out of the Covid-19 fund." Yeah, right. Again, there is no evidence whatsoever that this fund was ever misused, and it was small, and no other higher compensation specifically for Covid-19 exists. Not to forget, the extra money for a true Covid-19 uninsured episode of care would go to the hospital, not to the individual doctor who would still be compensated by procedure, or if the doctor is salaried (increasingly common), the doctor would be paid a flat fee in the form of his monthly salary. So what exactly is the incentive for the doctor for doing that?

3. Let's suppose the doctor were stupid and imprudent enough to commit the deliberate fraud listed on #2 above for pennies (or for no personal extra pay whatsoever, LOL), which is a felony that carries a federal prison sentence and loss of license. So, like with all deaths, to prevent lawsuits and to preserve standards of care and do engage in performance reviews of the medical staff for the sake of quality improvement, hospitals have committees that look into every death, and look into the care delivered. Can you imagine the hospital administration's surprise at this doctor's false Covid-19 certification of a cause of death? "Doctor, are you crazy? Do you think we want to defraud Medicare and be slapped with an audit by CMS, and if they substantiate the findings, pay huge fines, incur criminal charges, and experience loss of accreditation??? If that's what you did, you're on your own to defend yourself against it, because as of now, not only we're reporting you to CMS and to the State Board of Medical Examiners, but you're also fired for good cause."

Yeah, right, VERY likely that this kind of fraudulent over-reporting occurs in massive numbers... [insert sarcastic rolling eyes here]

 

First of all, it's not over. The virus is not dying down. Just look at France and Spain and Israel. This virus has a knack for coming in waves, appearing subdued and then flaring up again. While mortality rates have decreased from two factors, the improvement in treatment protocols, and a larger number of younger people getting infected, simultaneously it's been clearer and clearer that the virus also leaves significant morbidity behind it, among those who survive the acute condition, even in mild cases.

The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 came in three waves. The second and third waves were much worse than the first two, with several times more cases and deaths than the first wave.

Don't start yelling "Victory" yet lest you'll be another poster child for the "Mission Accomplished" banner fiasco.

We did very well? In what bizarro universe? While being the richest and most sophisticated nation on Earth, we have 4% of the Earth's population but got more than 20% of the Earth's cases and deaths, and you call it doing very well? Okaaaayyyy....

 

Be that as it may. New York's nursing home deaths are a smaller percentage than Florida's. Perhaps smaller than Texas. Shall we check?

 

Been there. Done that. Yesterday. Checking and checking and repeating the same points over and over ad nauseum doesn't seem to be changing the points.

Take per capita nursing home deaths out of total nursing home residents and New York is far worse than Florida or California.

Want to change the parameters away from per capita data? Again. Like you did yesterday. Aren't you bored yet?

 

Of course I want to take per capita out of it. New York got hit much harder than Florida because they got hit much earlier.
Why not use percent of deaths? Seems much more relevant to me.

 

It's pretty clear that Andrew Cuomo screwed up on the nursing home front. How can Democrats deny it? This is why I'm not a partisan and I'm an independent. Both parties suck. Why can't Democrats say "yep, that was bad" and why can't Republicans acknowledge it as well, when Trump is the one who screws up? I think there is plenty of stuff to criticize in both parties' response, including, there is a lot to criticize in how we, the people, have reacted to this pandemic. And some praise, too, for both sides. Examples, Governor MIke DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, did very well. Larry Hogan of Maryland, idem. Gavin Newsom of California did well too. Cuomo was a mixed bag. He did some things horribly (to a disqualifying point) but did some other things well.

 

What do you think he did wrong with nursing homes? Nobody moved Covid positive cases out unless they needed hospitalization.

 

Sometimes the obvious is the answer. They were outside.
Let's see... When did the South open? Oh yeah. Memorial day.

 

So I gather that you didn't know what happened... Read this:

"Cuomo's assertion that "it never happened" is false. According to a report from the New York State Department of Health, "6,326 COVID-positive residents were admitted to [nursing home] facilities" following Cuomo's mandate that nursing homes accept the readmission of Covid-positive patients from hospitals. Whether or not this was "needed," it did in fact happen.
On March 25, the state's Health Department issued an advisory requiring nursing homes to accept "the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals" if the patients were deemed medically stable."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/01/politics/andrew-cuomo-nursing-homes-fact-check/index.html

It was the other way around. He sent Covid-19 patients INTO the nursing homes. 6,326 of them.

When freaking CNN fact checkers agree that it did happen, you may want to revise your idea that it didn't.

 

Yes I understand all that - but.

state's own count ushered more than 6,300 recovering virus patients into nursing homes at the height of the pandemic.
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the virus' rampant run through New York nursing homes was propelled by the 37,500 nursing home workers who became infected between mid-March and early June and unknowingly passed the virus on.

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From a DC experiment.
The results of those tests, says Bricker, were eye-opening. Several residents and nearly a dozen staff had the virus but were asymptomatic — information the facility wouldn't have known without testing everybody.
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How long does it take for a recovered COVID-19 patient to no longer be contagious?
Most people with coronavirus who have symptoms will no longer be contagious by 10 days after symptoms resolve. People who test positive for the virus but never develop symptoms over the following 10 days after testing are probably no longer contagious, but again there are documented exceptions.Sep 24, 2020

If you've been exposed to the coronavirus - Harvard Health
www.health.harvard.edu › diseases-and-conditions › if-yo..

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And of course what should have happened. I have no idea if the nursing homes could follow these, because frankly the hospitals couldn't.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/nursing-homes-responding.html

So to make a long story short. The nursing homes were already crawling with infected people that no one knew about. Just like the rest of New York.

 

It's still a grave mistake.