Getting vaccinated

All the shit that doesn't fit!
If it doesn't go into the other forums, stick it in here.
A general free for all
User avatar
Long Run
Posts: 6717
Joined: Sat Apr 17, 2010 2:47 pm

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Long Run »

On a visceral level it sounds good to say non-vaccinated have to pay their own way. But the concept falls apart when you start looking at how we cover medical needs here and around the world. Are we going to stop covering treatment for the flu, measles, shingles, etc. because people did not get vaccinated. EKA notes a few of the other lifestyle driven medical issues that cost our society far more than COVID treatment. And the real cost of the non-vaccinated is not the unlucky small percentage that get sick and run up big personal bills; by far the biggest cost has been the high risk people who we shut the economy down for to protect (we are talking trillions upon trillions of world wide lost income that could have done a lot of good). The greater cost imposed by the non-vaccinated is the prolonging of the pandemic and its attendant costs. Taking away medical coverage from the few percent who get sick, lets the vast majority escape paying for the vast damage they have caused.

I have always considered the bigger cost savings for unhealthy lifestyles to be over on the Social Security retirement and other pension plan expenses. Unhealthy people, on average, are going to cost society more in medical costs even if they live a shorter life.

User avatar
eddieq
Posts: 461
Joined: Sun Apr 18, 2010 1:08 am

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by eddieq »

Had a doc appointment today for a follow-up on a condition he's helping me manage. As part of it, I got the flu jab. He also told me that it's time to get the shingles jab. He also wants me to get the booster when the Moderna is approved as such.

New photo of me attached
Pinhead_Hell_Priest.jpg
Pinhead_Hell_Priest.jpg (25.28 KiB) Viewed 814 times

User avatar
Sue U
Posts: 8545
Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2010 4:59 pm
Location: Eastern Megalopolis, North America (Midtown)

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Sue U »

Long Run wrote:
Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:46 pm
***
The greater cost imposed by the non-vaccinated is the prolonging of the pandemic and its attendant costs. Taking away medical coverage from the few percent who get sick, lets the vast majority escape paying for the vast damage they have caused.

I have always considered the bigger cost savings for unhealthy lifestyles to be over on the Social Security retirement and other pension plan expenses. Unhealthy people, on average, are going to cost society more in medical costs even if they live a shorter life.
This is exactly right. The last time I looked at the figures (a few years ago), nearly half of Americans spend virtually nothing on healthcare each year, while 5% of the population -- largely representing the chronically ill -- account for about half of all medical expenditures annually.
GAH!

Big RR
Posts: 14050
Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2010 9:47 pm

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Big RR »

True, but what proportion of that can be attributed to bad lifestyle choices vs just bad luck? A lot of the chronic diseases seen later in life are more likely due to bad genetics than bad choices.

User avatar
Gob
Posts: 33642
Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:40 am

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Gob »

Manslaughter?

A Covid-hit Irish pensioner was 'rescued' from a hospital by an Italian anti-vaxxer - only for him to die of the disease days later.

Covid patient Joe McCarron, 67, from Dungloe, County Donegal, was encouraged to leave Letterkenny University Hospital by his anti-vaxxer 'friends' on Tuesday, September 14.

However, he was rushed back into hospital by ambulance less than two days later, suffering from serious breathing difficulties, and died a week later on September 24.

In a video that was widely-shared online, Joe is seen visibly struggling to breathe as his anti-vaxxer 'friend' Italian Antonio Mureddu argues with doctors before taking him home from the hospital.

Antonio, a restaurant owner and former Italian soldier, claimed that Joe was being forced into the intensive care unit and that they were 'rescuing' him as the treatment would kill him.

He is heard in the clip saying: 'If you stay here, they're going to f****** kill you, Joe.'

The video, filmed by Antonio and later posted on Twitter, shows the tense interaction between the Joe and medical staff before he leaves hospital, with staff warning him that he could die at home.

One unidentified doctor is seen on camera leaning down to talk to Joe, who is sitting in a wheelchair breathing heavily, pleading with him that leaving the hospital would risk 'endangering' his life.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

ex-khobar Andy
Posts: 5419
Joined: Sat Dec 19, 2015 4:16 am
Location: Louisville KY as of July 2018

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

How horrifying. A manslaughter charge would be appropriate but I don't know Irish law. I would hope that the doctors and nurses in that unit would also individually sue him for libel: to say 'They are going to fucking kill you' and then publish it on Twatter meets all the requirements as far as I am concerned and I hope he is just impoverished along with a suitable jail term.

I had my Pfizer booster (i.e., third shot after the initial pair in Jan and Feb) yesterday and took the opportunity to get my heavy duty 'flu shot at the same time. Different arms.

I'm aware of a little tenderness in the 'flu shot locality - on a pain scale of 1 to 10 it's about 0.1 .

User avatar
Sue U
Posts: 8545
Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2010 4:59 pm
Location: Eastern Megalopolis, North America (Midtown)

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Sue U »

Big RR wrote:
Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:49 pm
True, but what proportion of that can be attributed to bad lifestyle choices vs just bad luck? A lot of the chronic diseases seen later in life are more likely due to bad genetics than bad choices.
A lot of it is a combination of the two: obesity, atherosclerosis and Type 2 diabetes all have both dietary and genetic components. COPD, liver disease and some cancers are also highly correlated with "lifestyle choices" (tobacco, alcohol, consumption of mammal flesh, etc.). But I am not advocating for penalizing anyone for their lifestyle or genetics or simple bad luck. I'm just saying that if we recognize where the problem is, we can target public policy to further reduce the size of that small, high-cost segment of the population, whether through prevention of chronic illness or finding cures for disease rather than just long-term management.
ex-khobar Andy wrote:
Thu Sep 30, 2021 11:53 am
I had my Pfizer booster (i.e., third shot after the initial pair in Jan and Feb) yesterday and took the opportunity to get my heavy duty 'flu shot at the same time. Different arms.

I'm aware of a little tenderness in the 'flu shot locality - on a pain scale of 1 to 10 it's about 0.1 .
My mom got her Pfizer booster the other day. She said she felt somewhat fatigued the following day with a little soreness at the injection site, but not as much as she had felt after her second shot back in February. She was back to all her regular activities by the evening. (She did allow as how some of her fatigue "might be because I'm starting to get old." She's 92.)
GAH!

User avatar
BoSoxGal
Posts: 18299
Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 10:36 pm
Location: The Heart of Red Sox Nation

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by BoSoxGal »

This is a terrifying story about a very fit person who got a mild case of covid19 from which he mostly recovered- except he didn’t, he had lingering symptoms which caused him to seek medical attention where it was determined the virus remained lurking in his body and was destroying his heart and other organs. The other organs recovered, but he had to have a heart transplant to save his life.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/pittsburgh ... ces/%3famp

It’s just a bad cold.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

User avatar
Guinevere
Posts: 8989
Joined: Mon Apr 19, 2010 3:01 pm

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Guinevere »

I found out last night that a dear friend of mine and her husband have been hospitalized with Covid since sometime last week. She, who is an iron lady at 85, is recovering. He is 10 years younger, had a series of mini strokes, and is in a vegetative state. He’s only receiving palliative care, and she is staying with him, holding his hand, and reading to him, until he quits. It’s heartbreaking and I’m mad at the world today.

They were both fully vaccinated, though potentially immunologically suppressed. I don’t know if they got a booster, or which version of a vaccine they had.

Fuck everyone who won’t wear a mask, or get vaxxed.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

User avatar
BoSoxGal
Posts: 18299
Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 10:36 pm
Location: The Heart of Red Sox Nation

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by BoSoxGal »

Guinevere wrote:
Fri Oct 01, 2021 12:38 am
I found out last night that a dear friend of mine and her husband have been hospitalized with Covid since sometime last week. She, who is an iron lady at 85, is recovering. He is 10 years younger, had a series of mini strokes, and is in a vegetative state. He’s only receiving palliative care, and she is staying with him, holding his hand, and reading to him, until he quits. It’s heartbreaking and I’m mad at the world today.

They were both fully vaccinated, though potentially immunologically suppressed. I don’t know if they got a booster, or which version of a vaccine they had.

Fuck everyone who won’t wear a mask, or get vaxxed.
So very sorry to hear this. :hug:
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

User avatar
TPFKA@W
Posts: 4833
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 4:50 am

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by TPFKA@W »

Fuck everyone who won’t wear a mask, or get vaxxed.
Yeah, well, good luck with all of that shit. A former coworker, someone I absolutely am so proud of, a single mom who has worked her way up to QMA and who is going to school to get her BSN very soon, who was twice vaccinated, wears all her PPE religiously, just came down with covid. We don't believe it was the delta variant because she tested positive on regular covid rapid tests. She is sick as a dog.

It's all palliative crap to make you feel like you are doing something to fight against covid, but I am no longer convinced it is doing much, especially those flimsy masks people are wearing, which really only help the manufacturers of said masks who are making out like bandits.

Fuck thoughts, prayers and hugs I am sending her a check to help out with sundries.

User avatar
Econoline
Posts: 9555
Joined: Sun Apr 18, 2010 6:25 pm
Location: DeKalb, Illinois...out amidst the corn, soybeans, and Republicans

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Econoline »

This is a Covid horror story in which no one actually gets Covid,
and it could still happen to anyone.

In August my dad was living independently in rural New Mexico, as he has for years, in a beautiful place with a view of the mountains. He got vaxxed against Covid as soon as it was available, wore masks, and was waiting out the pandemic like the rest of us.

Then, he had a fall.

When I called and he admitted that he was in the hospital, he was more annoyed than anything else. He tripped, he hurt his leg, couldn't go home for a week or so. How irritating. How dumb. He blamed himself. He loved me, hoped I was well, he was fine, etc. That was the last call.

What happened was that while in the hospital, my dad caught viral pneumonia that went unnoticed. The whole state was in lockdown, and every hospital ICU was filling up with unvaccinated Covid patients. There weren't enough resources. The governor begged people to get vaxxed.

My dad was not in the ICU, but in a physical rehab unit of the hospital to help him with his leg. They now say they did not know he had pneumonia at that point. He collapsed on the floor in his room and was left there, unnoticed, for six hours.

When they found him he was blue and had an oxygen level of 50. He did not have Covid. He was taken to the ER and put on a ventilator, but they had to put him in *a storage room* because there was physically not enough space due to all the unvaccinated Covid cases.

Twenty-four hours later, he was off the vent and his oxygen levels were restored. My siblings, who live closer, flew in. I spoke to him, and he was out of it but okay. Surely he would get treatment now. We thought that was the worst of it. It was not.

It was later explained to me that this hospital decided to *re-intubate my father* due to a lack of hospital resources. They couldn't manage. He could not see a cardiologist or a pulmonologist, they were all busy. They could not run the needed tests. So they kept him on the vent.

In normal circumstances, they simply would have transferred my dad to a larger hospital. There were several close by. It would have been routine. But due to Covid, it was impossible—so impossible, they thought, that they didn't even tell me he needed to be transferred.

A few days later, while I had thought my dad was improving—I kept being reassured by the nurses when I called—I finally called and got an exhausted, angry nurse who said bluntly: "we are tapped out and because of that your father is going to die. Maybe today. I'm sorry."

I demanded to speak to the doctor and he said more or less the same thing. The state was maxed out. My dad needed a cardiac ICU bed, or at least a cardiologist, and there was nothing for him. There was no hope, and no point even trying. Everywhere was full of the unvaccinated.

Now, there have been other stories like ours in the news over the past month or so. There was the father who was turned away from 43 ICUs and sadly passed away. People were being flown across state lines to try to save them, their families in terror, the health systems in chaos.

My dad's doctor said that New Mexico's ICU bed planning was centralized, so there was no point calling NM hospitals, but I could try ICUs in CO, AZ, TX, UT, CA—even though, he said, they had already tried all those. He would try again. I could call. I think he was humoring me.

The doctor said to "send him any leads" so when I called the hospitals, I said I was calling on his behalf. I never said I was his assistant or medical staff, but they talked to me. They were all maxed out. Nothing they could do.

After about five panicked hours of contacting every hospital, every person I could think of, and screaming my helplessness into the maw of the internet to see if anyone, anyone at all could help us, we finally reached a doctor in an ABQ hospital ICU who agreed to admit my dad.
So that was two weeks ago. If he'd gotten to that ICU even hours later, we would have lost him. They had to perform heroic acts to stabilize him. In a week his pneumonia had been brought under control, and he was starting to heal. They talked about a full recovery. However.

By that point my dad had been on a vent for more than ten days, simply because of a lack of access to care. If you're a med professional, you know why this matters. All signs looked good and so they decided to extubate him. At first he tolerated it, and then...he didn't.

Three days later, they had to intubate my dad for the third time. They said that doing this could result in a permanent disability. He could fully recover, but he also might not ever be independent again.

They gave me the option of "making him comfortable" instead, and you know what that means. But I'm my dad's PoA and he'd been clear that he wanted people to fight for him in a circumstance like this, so I said no. I told them to fight and do whatever they could to save him.

To save my dad, they had to perform a tracheostomy for long-term weaning from the ventilator. That means making a hole in his windpipe. "Like Stephen Hawking," someone said. It might be temporary, it might not. They didn't know if it would save him, but so far at least, it has.

I think of my dad before all this happened, still working, living in his own (rented) home, looking out at the mountains, calling his children in California and in France.

The doctors and nurses say that a full recovery and getting off the trache is possible, but will be hard.

They also say that none of this would have happened if it were not for the fact that so many people remain unvaccinated against Covid. Even in NM, with a decent vaccination rate, the system is overrun.

Please get vaccinated. Wear a mask. You never know how it will affect you.
:evil: :arg
People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
God @The Tweet of God

User avatar
Bicycle Bill
Posts: 9015
Joined: Thu Dec 03, 2015 1:10 pm
Location: Surrounded by Trumptards in Rockland, WI – a small rural village in La Crosse County

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Bicycle Bill »

FWIW, I just got back from getting my first jab (Pfizer), so I have joined the ranks of the partially-immunized.  Three weeks from now, I go back for the second one.

Between my work schedule and a pre-existing condition I was being treated for, never had the time to get around to it until now... and since I live alone and keep to myself as much as possible, saw no rush to be among the first in line when it was made available anyway. 
Image
-"BB"-
Yes, I suppose I could agree with you ... but then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?

User avatar
Guinevere
Posts: 8989
Joined: Mon Apr 19, 2010 3:01 pm

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Guinevere »

My friend’s husband died yesterday morning. Just another of the almost 700,000 Americans killed by this pandemic and the god-awful politics of individualism.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

Burning Petard
Posts: 4050
Joined: Fri Feb 12, 2016 5:35 pm
Location: Near Bear, Delaware

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Burning Petard »

IMNSHO, Guin comment above is key: "the god-awful politics of individualism."

Trump, "the Great Deal Maker" tore up the social contract. Since then too many people have walked out of the room where the attempt is being made to negotiate a new one.

snailgate

User avatar
Guinevere
Posts: 8989
Joined: Mon Apr 19, 2010 3:01 pm

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Guinevere »

It was happening long before Trump, but (imo) he validated it on a national level and made it a point of pride - and not even in any principled way - but in as mean and nasty and “I’ve got mine and I don’t give a crap about you getting yours” as I have ever observed.

The concept of community and shared burden/obligation has been decimated, and I don’t know if the Genie can ever go back into the bottle.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

ex-khobar Andy
Posts: 5419
Joined: Sat Dec 19, 2015 4:16 am
Location: Louisville KY as of July 2018

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

This kind of says it all (thanks to NYT):

Image

I assume (don't know but I could not find it in the piece) that the dotted line is the least squares correlation between the level of unvaccination and the Trump 2020 share in that state. It may be statistically weighted for the population of the state because if I were eyeballing it, the line would have a steeper gradient.

ex-khobar Andy
Posts: 5419
Joined: Sat Dec 19, 2015 4:16 am
Location: Louisville KY as of July 2018

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

A quote from the piece
Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.

User avatar
Guinevere
Posts: 8989
Joined: Mon Apr 19, 2010 3:01 pm

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Guinevere »

ex-khobar Andy wrote:
Sun Oct 03, 2021 1:41 pm
A quote from the piece
Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.
God helps those who help themselves. Or something…. :offs:
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké

User avatar
Bicycle Bill
Posts: 9015
Joined: Thu Dec 03, 2015 1:10 pm
Location: Surrounded by Trumptards in Rockland, WI – a small rural village in La Crosse County

Re: Getting vaccinated

Post by Bicycle Bill »

ex-khobar Andy wrote:
Sun Oct 03, 2021 1:41 pm
A quote from the piece
Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.
At that rate, there will be fewer of them when the 2022 election cycle comes around.
It's a small thing, but I'll take it for now.
Image
-"BB"-
Yes, I suppose I could agree with you ... but then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?

Post Reply