The vote to responsible Covid behavior correlation is shocking, and the overlay shows the trends of the redder an area gets, the dumber it gets, and the opposite for bluer. A lack of education leaves these people vulnerable to efficient sophistry, and they end up as nothing more than political putty for hate radio and those that set this country back.That's a dyspeptic Kos diarist ringing the usual liberal chimes. There might be lower vaccination rates downstate, and there is more pressure on the intensive care beds available in the sparsely settled areas. "New COVID-19 hospital admissions have slowed down amid Illinois’ Delta variant coronavirus surge, but hospitals are still being pushed to the limit in southern Illinois — where all ICU beds were filled Monday night." There aren't many beds to fill. "It’s worse in 20 counties spanning the southern tip of the state. All 88 ICU hospital beds were occupied Monday night for a region that’s home to more than 400,000 residents and that has a testing positivity rate of 10.3%." No doubt, the boffins who issued certificates of need for the construction of an intensive care unit carefully calculated that the public interest would not be served by an 89th bed, or an even hundred for those counties.
Our data supported facts are superior to their ill-informed opinions. I know this because many that would have otherwise argued this with me can no longer, because they are dead of Covid. I am not guaranteed safety from Covid, but an intelligent person does what they can to listen to science and make rational decisions.
Intensive care units, though, are not solely for taking care of people in distress from coronavirus. "Clearly many patients right now are seriously ill. We also know that overcrowding of hospitals by COVID patients with even mild illness can have negative implications for patients in need of other care. At the same time, this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two." The establishment's narrative builds on those "negative implications." Those people who couldn't bother with getting vaccinated are now making things more difficult for people who get into car crashes or have strokes. "That means any of the 400,000-plus residents of southern Illinois who need critical care — even those without COVID-19, such as stroke victims and car crash survivors — could have to be sent to hospitals hours away to get the treatment they need."
A year and a half ago, hospitals postponed elective surgeries and some treatments the better to keep capacity available for a surge of coronavirus patients in distress. After each of the previous lulls in coronavirus infections (the next lull is about to begin) they started catching up. Thus, some of the current occupants of intensive care units are people who had to defer treatment in one of the earlier increases in infections, and the latest surge of coronavirus infections is adding to that pressure on capacity. Once the dust settles, the research projects could be interesting. But for the coronavirus lockdowns, how many people could have had their conditions treated before they worsened enough to warrant hospitalization or intensive care? Intensive care units aren't supposed to be sitting idle in any case; how much inefficiently idle capacity was there during the initial lockdowns, and how much inefficient stressing of the capacity is there now? Hardest question: how many quality adjusted life years might people have lost as a consequence of deferred early treatment, and how many quality adjusted life years did the corona lockdowns gain people? (That is, if being deprived of freedom of association and movement is any kind of quality of life.) On net, have the corona mitigations reduced economic welfare?
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