Consider a thought experiment: What if the NTSB were brought in to look at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic? What would its investigation conclude? I’ll jump to the answer before laying out the background: This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.
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Well said. I have been paying attention since everything went south in Wuhan& remember the 1st case of community spread in USA (“how did that happen” I asked self) & what has happened since, e. G., 40000cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday & VP Pence goes to church services in Dallas where a 100 member choir sings as if nobody will get sick. Houston is out of hospital beds. Sorry to share.
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My wife and I were warned very early on by an acquaintance in the medical research field with DOD in DC. When we passed the info on to friends, they thought we’d lost our minds. Their thinking has changed but lots of folks still don’t get how serious this is.
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No worries mates. Trump said in an interview with Fox today that the Coronavirus will “sort of just disappear”. I believe that he has said this already before. So be a little patient and all will be well.
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Actually, we are not out of hospital beds in Houston. . .
You mean the media isn’t telling us the truth?
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More a matter of people not looking at the whole of the issue. Cherry picking “factoids” is the standard means to manipulate people on either side of a politicized public health emergency. It isn’t the media, it’s those who benefit by weaponizing news.
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All in this thread, no media sources involved.
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23 hours ago ABC13 Houston TV station said patients are getting sent to other towns.
Fascinating read on the hospital bed issue, from the Texas Tribune. (Edited at…Bolding added):
Texas won’t specify where hospital beds are available as coronavirus cases hit record highs
BY SARAH R. CHAMPAGNE JULY 2, 2020 9 HOURS AGO
…As Texas sets records for new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations day after day, the state’s hospital capacity — one of the key metrics that Gov. Greg Abbott cited as he allowed businesses to reopen — has become the focus of increased attention and concern.
But the state isn’t releasing the information it collects about how many beds individual hospitals have available. And only a fraction of the state’s hospitals, cities and counties are providing that information to the public on their own.
The Texas Department of State Health Services has that data at its disposal. Hospitals across the state have been sending daily reports on how many available regular and intensive care unit beds they have, as well as the number of available ventilators, to regional health authorities, which send the information to the state. The agency then publicly releases that data for the state as a whole and for the state’s 22 trauma service regions.
Data for individual hospitals or counties is not made public “because hospitals within trauma service areas coordinate to ensure their communities have necessary care, and because people often cross county lines to get hospital care,” said Chris Van Deusen, a DSHS spokesperson.
Hospital officials in Houston and other parts of the state recently warned that hospitals could get overwhelmed if the number of infections keeps climbing. Statewide, 6,904 patients in Texas were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Wednesday — a figure that has been going up nearly every day since June 1.
…According to data from DSHS, the state had 1,322 available intensive care unit beds and close to 13,000 available hospital beds Wednesday. But there are important regional disparities. The Northeast Texas Regional Advisory Council reported Wednesday that 43% of its hospital beds are in use with 92 ICU beds available, while the East Texas Gulf Coast Regional Advisory Council, which includes nine counties and more than 1.3 million people, is 83% full with only 10 open ICU beds.
…Many local government and health authorities have opted not to make hospital capacity information public.
“Publicly, we do not share which hospitals are at capacity, because there is constant shifting and we want the hospitals to have the freedom to move resources as needed,” Mark Escott, Austin’s interim public health authority, said in an email…
Texas Tribune gives daily updates on new COVID-19 cases and total deaths.