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~*Official #COVID-19 Thread of Doom*~ Revenge of Omicron Prime

AbsolutSurgen
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AbsolutSurgen

AbsolutSurgen

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Some Canadian emergency rooms are being walloped by “ridiculous” numbers of people with suspected or confirmed COVID, with symptoms ranging from what essentially resembles a mild cold to, in the unvaccinated and vulnerable, severe COVID pneumonias, frontline doctors are reporting.

Some are arriving in hospital with minimal symptoms, driven there instead by anxiety or a desire to confirm their COVID status, and with having had no clearly communicated advice on what to do if they do get COVID.

“We are still catastrophizing COVID,” said Dr. Martha Fulford, an infectious diseases specialist and chief of medicine at the McMaster University Medical Center. “We have somehow made when you have a positive result equal disaster in a lot of people’s minds.”

“The emotion and fear are so overwhelming. It’s very difficult to try to break through this,” Fulford said.

 

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But doctors stress this isn’t March 2020, when people arrived in hospital extremely sick with gastro symptoms like vomiting or diarrhea, or dangerously short of breath. In New York City, where doctors and healthcare workers served as trailblazers in the first wave of SARS-CoV-2 and where hospitalizations surpassed 10,000 this week for the first time in 20 months , “we aren’t seeing as many patients gasping for air,” Dr. Craig Spencer, a NYC emergency doctor tweeted this week. “Thankfully the COVID patients aren’t as sick. BUT there are SO many of them.”

Unlike March 2020, when there were no vaccines, “We’re not seeing a lot of admissions for respiratory failure, we’re not seeing a lot of patients being put on high-flow oxygen, being intubated” and ventilated, or put on BiPAP machines that deliver oxygen under pressure through a mask, said Dr. Eric Legome, who runs two Mount Sinai Health System emergency sites in New York City. “What we are seeing is people who are being admitted because they are extremely weak, dizzy, a fall risk.” Severe lung inflammation was a major issue in wave one, with people suffering respiratory distress and respiratory failure. “That’s not so much an issue this time,” Legome said. “We’re not seeing a huge number of COVID pneumonia and people requiring intensive respiratory support. We’re not seeing that very much at all.”

 

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“Of all the patients we have with Omicron, the vast, vast majority are going home,” Legome said. Of those hospitalized, “It tends to be the patients who would be admitted otherwise: You’re 90 years old, you have underlying pulmonary disease, heart failure, you have a hip replacement, you don’t get along well at baseline and then you have Omicron on top of that and you just can’t get out of bed. It’s that type that we’re seeing more of,” he said.

“It does clearly feel like the ones that seem to be more symptomatic tend to be the ones that are not fully vaccinated or boosted, or vaccinated at all.”

 

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Canadian doctors are also seeing lots of COVID in emergency departments. “And it’s all Omicron,” radiologist Dr. David Jacobs tweeted Wednesday morning in the final hours of a long overnight shift at Humber River Hospital in Toronto.

“The cases coming to the emergency room are basically all comers,” Jacobs said in an interview. They range from those with mild symptoms and no shortness of breath, but who are worried and want to be tested, up to those with seriously “robust” pneumonias.

Of those sick enough to get a chest X-ray or CT scan of the chest, “those patients, for the most part, don’t have a lot of findings,” said Jacobs, president of the Ontario Association of Radiologists. Most of them are also vaccinated. “They’ll either be completely normal chest X-rays or they’ll be very subtle, very mild pneumonia.”

A very small number of X-rays, however, are “downright horrible,” he said. The horrible ones, where the lungs are whited out, with more fluid in the air spaces than air, are seen in the unvaccinated, as well as the immune compromised — people with kidney failure, cancer patients on chemotherapy, organ transplant recipients — and the frail elderly with waning immunity and so many underlying health problems they simply can’t cope with even a mild case of COVID pneumonia.

The severe cases look the same as the cases seen during the height of Delta and the first wave, Jacobs said. “Why that scares me is that it tells me that this virus is as bad a player as any other before it. It can be a milder virus, but it can also be quite severe,” and the only real differentiators are vaccination status, immune status and age.

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Of the approximately 90 COVID-positive people in Humber River’s 744-bed hospital Wednesday afternoon, 29 per cent are 60 to 79, and 41 per cent 80 or older. Among the hospitalized, 50 are in hospital because of COVID, and 40 with COVID as an incidental diagnosis, meaning they were admitted for appendicitis, for example, or a broken leg or delivering a child, “and they happen to have COVID,” Jacobs said. “That kind of distribution has held relatively stable.” Seven people were in the ICU, “much, much lower than we’ve had with previous waves.”

Our measures are still the shot-gun approach -- we should have a pretty good idea who is at risk of serious illness at this point - instead of putting in protections that actively protect the high-at-risk (i.e. senior homes, LTC homes, people with comorbidities (i.e. diabetes)), 

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CitizenVectron

CitizenVectron

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1 minute ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

 

 

 

 

Our measures are still the shot-gun approach -- we should have a pretty good idea who is at risk of serious illness at this point - instead of putting in protections that actively protect the high-at-risk (i.e. senior homes, LTC homes, people with comorbidities (i.e. diabetes)), 

 

I agree (in theory), but I don't know if that can be done in practice. The entire idea of just protecting the vulnerable (even with less-contagious strains earlier on) was never a fully-formed concept. How do you protect people in LTCs, for example? Obviously vaccination+boosters. But then you have the staff who have their own lives and families. You can mandate vaccination for them, but you can't control how they live outside of work. I'm not disagreeing with you, just that there's never been very well thought out solutions.

 

The same goes for schools right now. I think that closing schools will slow the spread (because let's face it, governments are 100% lying when they say there is no spread in schools). Okay, so close them and help spread out this wave to reduce the chance of overloading hospitals. But, I also think it won't really do much since Omicron is still spreading everywhere else. Okay then, so keep them open. Except it's not that easy, either, because we can't keep them all open since so many kids and teachers are getting sick. Okay, so...keep them open, but having rolling closures as staff get sick? There's no actual, real solution to this, unfortunately, and I think that's why governments don't know what to do. With Delta we could control the spread, but with Omicron we can't.

 

I think at this point the thing that is going to determine most measures (including school closures, hospital restrictions, some businesses closing, etc) is going to come down to staffing. Too many people are going to be sick to keep everything open all the time for the next 2-3 months. Some people are kind of throwing in the towel and saying that otherwise-healthy people with symptoms should just keep working in order to keep the economy going...but that also ignores human dignity and the right to take time off when you're not feeling well. It might work in places like the US with weaker labour laws...but where I live, if I have the sniggles or whatever then fuck it, I'm calling in sick and using the time I am entitled to.

 

So I think we agree that the decision to close schools (among other things) isn't being made for the correct reasons...but I also think that there was no actual good decision in the first place. Close them or keep them open...they are all going to have disruptions/closures at some point anyway, and the school year is going to suffer (as well as parents needing to find childcare/take time off, etc).

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chakoo

chakoo

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Hospital admits are spiking in ontario.

 

 

Also, yeah feel free to roll the dice with your kids

 

ab7o1921_87230764-w.jpg

CHEO urges pregnant women to get vaccinated after six babies are admitted to hospitals with COVID-19

OTTAWACITIZEN.COM
"There is a good transfer of antibodies to the newborn. We are extrapolating it will protect the baby for at least the first few months of life."

 

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45 minutes ago, chakoo said:

Hospital admits are spiking in ontario.

 

 

Also, yeah feel free to roll the dice with your kids

 

ab7o1921_87230764-w.jpg

CHEO urges pregnant women to get vaccinated after six babies are admitted to hospitals with COVID-19

OTTAWACITIZEN.COM
"There is a good transfer of antibodies to the newborn. We are extrapolating it will protect the baby for at least the first few months of life."

 


While certainly a tragic outcome, this sort of thinking that because of an extreme exception people are making some sort of unwise gamble with the lives of their children is hard for me to understand. Looking at Canada, around 300 children a year die in non-traffic related accidents each year. So even if you wanted to classify this as a death related to behavior, it barely moves the needle there. I genuinely don’t know how you could live life at all if you feel this is “rolling the dice”.

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Commissar SFLUFAN

Commissar SFLUFAN

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Just now, Air_Delivery said:
pti01032022000153a-1-1068191-1641390283.

84-year-old Bihar man gets 11 Covid vaccine shots, caught while going

WWW.DECCANHERALD.COM
Bihar has reported some of the most bizarre cases related to the Covid-19 vaccination campaign -- from dead people receiving messages of successful administration of the vaccine, to Prime Minister

 

 

You've got some catching up to do @Jason and @SuperSpreader

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DarkStar189

DarkStar189

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Seriously almost everyone around me is testing positive for Covid. I feel like our household could get it any day at this rate. My wife babysat a friend's 1 year old baby 2 days ago. Today the baby got a fever. The mom, dad, and baby all just got rapid tests and are positive for Covid. Couple other friends on Facebook are all saying they are positive with mild symptoms. My wife was close to the baby while she was here, holding her and such. The baby wasn't coughing. She was never all up in her face or anything. Not sure how worried we should be right now... 

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skillzdadirecta

skillzdadirecta

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Downtown-Los-Angeles-skyline.jpg?w=1024

New Los Angeles Covid Cases Shatter Single-Day Record By 10,000 Infections

DEADLINE.COM
New Los Angeles Covid Cases Shatter Single-Day Record By 10,000 Infections; Hospitalizations And Deaths Doubled In Past Week

 

Also Los Angeles

 

SoFi-Stadium.jpg?w=1024

Super Bowl In L.A. Is A Go, Says Top Health Official: “I Feel Really Confident The Event Will Happen Here”

DEADLINE.COM
Super Bowl In L.A. Is A Go, Says Top Health Official: "I Feel Really Confident The Event Will Happen Here"

 

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Air_Delivery

Air_Delivery

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15 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:
Downtown-Los-Angeles-skyline.jpg?w=1024

New Los Angeles Covid Cases Shatter Single-Day Record By 10,000 Infections

DEADLINE.COM
New Los Angeles Covid Cases Shatter Single-Day Record By 10,000 Infections; Hospitalizations And Deaths Doubled In Past Week

 

Also Los Angeles

 

SoFi-Stadium.jpg?w=1024

Super Bowl In L.A. Is A Go, Says Top Health Official: “I Feel Really Confident The Event Will Happen Here”

DEADLINE.COM
Super Bowl In L.A. Is A Go, Says Top Health Official: "I Feel Really Confident The Event Will Happen Here"

 

We have entered the YOLO phase of the pandemic response :dumpster_fire:

I plan on going full hermit until at least omicron burns itself out. Then loosen up until the next variant comes along. Rinse and repeat. 

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Joestradamus

Joestradamus

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My sister's boyfriend (unvaccinated) tested positive Monday morning. My sister and my other sister tested positive yesterday. My mom, brother and two nieces (2 yrs and 5 yrs old, both unvaccinated) are all stuck in the same apartment trying their best to quarantine. My wife and I were in close proximity to my sister's bf on Sunday, who was suspecting of it being covid at that time but didn't say a damn word. We tested immediately because of panic and that came back negative, but we're going back for a second covid test tomorrow morning. In the last couple hours I've started feeling body aches a little... I'm hoping that's just anxiety doing me in.

 

3 cousins, 2 aunts, and supposedly even my aunt's dog tested covid positive this week.

 

For almost two years we've avoided this shit and it's started to hit us all here.

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