I work neurosurgical ICU and at least half of all the patients we get are LITERALLY s direct result of the unhealthy lifestyle they've lived their entire lives. Unchecked and uncontrolled blood pressure and diabetes, massive obesity, copious amounts of alcohol, and a lifetime of smoking.

The other half are actual sick or injured people and it's insane the difference in LOS and severity of illness when comparing the two. The actual sick ones are almost always in and out of the ICU in a few days. The ones who essentially did it to themselves are always there for what feels like an eternity.

That's literally all healthcare has been for the past like 20 years, and it's just getting increasingly worse as the years go on.

Healthcare in America nowadays is basically just treating self created illness. It's all heart disease/failure from a shitty diet and lack of exercise, kidney failure due to uncontrolled diabetes and hypertension caused by, you guessed it, shitty diet and lack of exercise. Strokes and heart attacks due to, again, shitty diet and lack of exercise.

An overwhelming majority of people in the hospital are here because of overconsumption and a complete lack of any semblance of a healthy lifestyle. Basically boils down to extreme excess of fast food, alcohol, smoking, and lack of physical activity.

Depending on the definition of underlying illness, they likely actually did have underlying illness. I work in the ICU, a patient can have "no prior medical history" and "no underlying illness" if they literally just have never been to a doctor previously and been diagnosed with something.

It's considered a "new diagnosis" even if they've clearly been hypertensive, diabetic, etc for a loooooooong time.

That was literally my first thought. Why in the actual fuck is there not a single person checking on that man at all, especially when there are like 8 people all standing around.

To be fair, most contraceptives aren't 100% effective and manufacturers still recommend using condoms to prevent both pregnancy and STD transmission. Iirc, condoms are actually statistically more effective than birth control.

Contraceptives also have some SUPER gnarly side effects, including serious disability and death.

Not really a great example, but I get the point

Why doesn't anyone talk about the way that votes are counted and reported as a means of preventing fraud? How has nobody looked at the way that dem cheating strongholds like wayne county etc are ALWAYS the last ones counting votes and realized how fucked that is.

This entire election would have likely ended VERY differently if there was some type of rule or law in place that changed the way the reporting was done to completely remove the ability to say "let's wait and see how many votes we need" aspect from the voting process. If there were a system like this in place where nobody knew the current running vote tallies Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin wouldn't have had the ability to halt voting to scramble to get all those dumps together.

If the updates hadn't been live streamed in real time there wouldn't have been the opportunity to shut shit down and drag the process out for an entire week while they "find" the number of votes needed to win. There also wouldn't be any reference for how many votes they can pack the boxes with based on reporting number of votes compared to the number of voters etc.

Every state across the country should have deadlines for all mail-in, absentee, oversees, special whatever of when the polls close. Then the vote counting and reporting should be done with certified completion of counting. Wayne and all other counties should be required to say "we are officially done counting, no more ballots will be rolling in" before vote tallies should be allowed to start rolling out and the tallies should all begin to roll out around the same time.

Republicans can legislate rules and restrictions on different forms of voting until they're blue in the face, but unless we fix all the vulnerabilities that allow things like ballot dumps and mail in fraud to even be effective to begin with we won't ever make progress.

I think the point he was making is that it depends on the scale you are talking and how interconnected everything is, at least the way I read it.

In this case, everyone has a responsibility and a job (the guy bacteria, organs, etc, etc) and without the others doing their job appropriately the rest of the organism dies. If your gut bacteria stop breaking down food into the basic nutrients, the intestines can't absorb them and the rest of the body dies. If the skin and it's micro biome didn't keep invading pathogens out the infection would kill the rest of the body. Etc etc.

I think this scales up. If you don't have a strong nuclear family you can't provide at the most basic level. If you don't have a community doctor, or farmer, or whatever else, the community as a whole suffers. HOWEVER this only scales up effectively if the smallest units are working together. If your nuclear family isn't strong and/or your neighbor doesn't have a strong nuclear family, you can't have a strong street and neighborhood. If you don't have strong neighborhoods you can't have a strong city. If you don't have a strong city you can't have a strong county. Etc.

In my opinion, the biggest flaw with the whole "support everyone" ideal of the left is WHO is going to do that? A random stranger with no skin in the game? Who the fuck cares about Joe Shmo and his family and community when they're literally just numbers and letters on a piece of paper.

So far neither of my jobs have required it and I don't plan on getting it until then.

In regards to the second part I totally agree. I feel like it SERIOUSLY discredits the overall movement to be talking about things that border on being anti-vax and other levels of crazy. Kind hard to navigate to a website and see frequent submissions and comments saying things like "have you even ever met someone with covid? I haven't and nobody I know has either, it's all a lie designed to make you obedient" and then take the rest of the posts seriously.

They might very well be using covid to force obedience and whatever else, however that doesn't mean covid isn't real, it just means it's being used for corrupt purposes.

What you're saying is falling on deaf ears around here. People don't even understand the basic sciences and histories of stuff like this and have basically made their decision based on lack of understanding, fear, and in some instances just plain bad information.

It doesn't matter that this technology has been around since the early 90's and was great specifically because it would allow for rapid production of vaccines or treatments. People unfortunately fear what they don't understand.

With that in mind, there is a solid argument that a normal, generally healthy person really isn't at any major risk in contracting covid so the vaccine is largely unnecessary. I personally haven't gotten it even though I've had the opportunity since early December through my job. I'm young, healthy and low risk. Don't think it's all that necessary, especially if I'm still gonna have to mask up and wear all the PPE when someone else she it.

If only if only lmao. I literally do personalized education with exactly that info on a regular basis and they still don't listen.

I worked covid ICU for months and this is all well and true, but the biggest thing that literally everyone is overlooking is that this thing was only really ever dangerous to people who's health was already failing. Regardless of age, sex, gender, race, location, whatever the people the hardest hit were of poor health. The major population that was coming to the ICU and dying was the massively overweight and chronic disease riddled patients.

This can be caused by a slew of reasons whether that be cultural, socioeconomic status, education levels, etc.

In the months of covid ICU, we had only a handful of "regular" people with an appropriate BMI and no comorbidities. They generally all ended up being fine. The residents up here used to play over under on how many comorbidities or medications for chronic illnesses the overhead calls for intubation (those people would come to us) to see who would have to gown up to do all the admission stuff in room.

If you take that piece one step further, places like India and Africa also have extremely low rates of obesity and associated chronic conditions for obvious reason.

I'm not saying that there isn't some big conspiracy or whatever going on, just that there are also regular, well known issues that caused this to be bad in certain regions and populations

If you take a quick tally of all the places that were SUPER hard hit they are all at or near the top percentile of most obese populations with the most number of chronic health conditions. Almost all of them are developed nations that have the ability to keep people with chronic illness alive for an absolute eternity.

It's realistically probably less about something as simple as chronic vitamin D deficiency (you'd see a statistically disproportionately high number of cases/deaths above the 45th parallel than below it), and more about overall health status.

If you want a visual and great explanation on the concept of herd immunity look up the chain of infection and read a little bit about it.

Basically for a comment reply, the gist is that there are 6 main components that are necessary for disease to spread. If you break any of the links in that chain then you prevent the spread of infection. The more links you break the harder the spread for infection.

Each infection is different and acts in different ways and our own man made preventions and such all have different levels of effectiveness.

As an example, dysentery is severe diarrhea caused by pathogens in contaminated food and water. As long as you prevent the contamination of food and water this essentially goes away. This is something we essentially "cured" through improved hygiene hundreds of years ago.

For something like influenza which has VERY hit or miss immunization coverage and that is spread easily by respiratory droplets that are coughed or sneezed up it is better to have a combination of approaches which is why they recommend the influenza vaccine for those at risk of coming into contact or those who are at risk of serious complications if they get influenza. They also recommend people covering coughs and sneezes, not touching your face, social distancing, and washing hands frequently.

Herd immunity is something you want when the spread of something is not easily controlled by breaking other links in that chain. Measles is an airborne virus. It has super small particles that travel easily and the infection can be EXTREMELY dangerous and even deadly. You can't exactly just cover your cough (mode of transmission) and not touch your face (portal of entry) because you can literally just breath that virus in from the air. This is where the idea of herd immunity comes in. If enough people are vaccinated and able to effectively fight the virus and prevent it's spread it no longer has a host (reservoir) to hang out in. If you make enough people immune to being reservoirs, then people who are unable to get vaccines for whatever reason are at a much lower risk of becoming infected.

The virus has nothing to do with DNA. DNA is like your cells brain, it's wrapped up neatly in the middle of the cell and is extremely difficult to get into and change. Typically cancer is the result of DNA changes.

Viruses latch onto certain types of receptors on cell walls which allows them to a variety of things, the biggest being able to enter a cell to turn the protein creating portions of your cells into virus producing factories. This process causes your immune system to react and try to kill those infected cells to prevent the spread, this is what generally causes actual symptoms of being sick like fever, body aches, cough, etc. The body can go into overdrive with this which is called a cytokine storm which is the big issue early on with covid. This reaction causes severe inflammation and a bunch of other issues.

In regards to the cell marker the virus targets, it's different for every virus and they all work in different ways. Covid is thought to like the ACE2 receptor which is found largely in the lungs, heart, blood vessels, kidneys, and the GI system which explains the slew of symptoms.

In terms of treatments, the treatments that have been used all work in very different ways. Ivermectin and HCQ are both anti parasitic drugs with HCQ also being an immunosuppressant. The thought behind these ones helping was that it prevented the body from going into the cytokine storm that is essentially the kickstart for the whole illness cascade. Based on what the docs around here are talking about they basically think these drugs have to essentially be timed perfectly for it to be truly effective. Being a preventative treatment means it isn't guaranteed to prevent illness and people will still get sick regardless.

Take all this with a grain of salt. I obviously don't have all the answers to everything, but this is based on what I have seen personally with covid ICU patients over the past year as well as what the infectious disease and pulmonology docs are using in their treatments.

Of course. That still doesn't change the fact that this is still something that is difficult to treat.

I guess what I'm basically trying to get at here is even if tomorrow, every world leader came out and said this is an engineered influenza virus created by China, it doesn't change the fact that even our best treatment options are hit or miss. What difference does it make whether it's labeled an influenza strain, or it's man made, or whatever else. It doesn't change the medical problems that come with this.

Some patients get remdezivir, or ivermectin, or whatever and some steroids and are on their way in 5 days despite having diabetes, heart failure, and are overweight. Others get remdezivir, or ivermectin, or whatever and literally nothing happens and they end up in the ICU for 46 days.

The people who have these stays are the ones having crazy other issues like heart and kidney failure, blood clots, etc. They're generally stable from a respiratory standpoint for weeks before the rest of the problems clear up.

ICU nurse here. I don't have an answer and won't try to pretend to know the truth any which way about whether it's flu or not etc, I don't care about any of that. What most of us in healthcare, have experienced and seen and is why we're concerned, is that patients who are critically ill with this thing are unlike anything we've previously dealt with before and treatments are hit or miss. Hospital I work at has like 18 different clinical trials happening including ivermectin and it literally seems like it comes down to a coin toss on whether any of them will work. Even in patients with comorbidities, the traditional flu is a respiratory thing and presents as a respiratory thing. Very, very rarely did we ever have flu patients coming in with the massively vast range of issues that the patients are experiencing with this thing now. Weird types of heart failure, kidney failure, clotting issues in people who should not have clotting issues as well as clotting even when on hard core anticoagulation, neurologic problems, the list goes on. Basically my point is, even if this does end up being confirmed as a weird flu strain, it doesn't change the fact that this is still stupid difficult to treat.

Oh I know, it's just real obnoxious to me that there's just such a huge lack of basic understanding. I'm not out here tryna change anyone's mind or anything, just sorta pointing out the obvious.

In my opinion, if you're gonna bash something you should at least have a basic understanding of what you're bashing and why, just makes you (the collective, not you specifically) look goofy and discredits your movement when you clearly aren't even understanding the most basic concepts.

I'm lumping your title in with my original statement because people testing positive for a virus despite being vaccinated shouldn't be a surprise to literally anyone who has a concept or understanding of how vaccines work.

Regardless of any other argument, the number of people who have literally no concept of how a vaccine even works, which includes the way it was originally designed to work, is absolutely astounding to me.

For the record, I'm NOT making any argument for or against any specific vaccine.

It can't give you herpes, but any stress or immune response, in this case the intended reaction to getting a vaccine is an immune response, can cause a herpes flare up if you already have herpes.

Venting someone as a literal last resort was one of the biggest changes made from the first round of this thing but so far nothing has prevented people from reaching that point. First everyone was on HCQ/Zithro with zinc/vit c/vit d supps. Then it was remdezivir. Now it's ivermectin or one of a slew of other meds or combinations.

So far nothing has prevented people from hitting the ICU and requiring intubation. I know y'all like to make it a black and white subject around here like there's a choice between pills and some iv medicine or a ventilator as treatment, but that's not how it goes lol.

I got nothing on the visitation though. I work ICU and we already had visitor limitations before the whole thing. Never anything that prevented end of life visitation etc though.

Someone can be immunocompromised for a whole slew of reasons, from not playing in nature enough (current research suggests this is why allergic and autoimmune diseases have been exploding in recent years), cancer treatments, medications or other illness, age, etc.

Like I said, I personally don't want the covid vaccine because 1) it has only been a few months and I'd like to see more long term testing which leads me to 2) I'm young and healthy and personally am classifying this into the flu vaccine group in terms of necessity for me. I'm young and healthy and take relatively good care of myself. Even in the event that I do get either influenza or covid, I'll probably be fine.

However, if my hospitals start requiring it, it's not a big enough deal to me that I would give up my job and be outraged over all this because the vaccine itself is not that big of a deal.

If you are seeking exemptions, yes, which is why it is illegal to discriminate against those people and why I said in my comment that those protected individuals are the obvious exception here.

"Annual influenza immunization is required for all employees, including, but limited to, physicians, fellows, volunteers, students, contracted personnel, and professional staff, unless medical contraindication or religious prohibition exists."

Literally right from the top of the policy.

Not everywhere requires them, I shouldn't have been so all inclusive when I said every single one. A large majority of healthcare orgs require it, unless exempt etc.

I 110% agree with this, to a certain degree.

Healthcare is both an individual and community focused field. For some things there needs to be much more focus on the others. For other things there needs to be a bigger focus on community. Unfortunately certain disease spreads from person to person which makes that a community problem. When you participate in society, you either agree to certain rules (vaccines for MMR, polio, etc to go to public schools or as an agreement for certain jobs) or you make the decision to live a life without those societal niceties and some extra hurdles to jump over.

Healthcare in this country is absolutely atrocious and health literacy is even worse. Healthy diet, exercise, vitamins, etc are all excellent and all your body really needs to fight something off, as a normal healthy individual. However, there are many people who are not able to do that or are immunocompromised and unable to do that naturally which is why vaccines are a thing and are important and (other than the covid vaccine) have very little to no real major risk.

Based on your comment and complete and total lack of absolutely any understanding of how vaccines work ("does not kill any virus, people still get the flu after the flu shot") I'm not going to be able to change your mind on the science so I won't even address it.

In terms of everything else, like I've told you nobody can hold you down and force you to get a vaccine. I have never once tried to say anything of that nature. FOR CONDITION OF EMPLOYMENT, because we live in a free country, your employer can require you to get a flu or covid vaccine, get a drug screen, a criminal background check, a credit check yada yada. You are not required to accept those terms and you do not have to get that vaccine or authorize a background check if you don't want too.

Like I said, I don't agree with requiring the flu vaccine etc as condition of employment. But I also knew that would be a requirement for my career and had to make a choice on whether a flu vaccine was a big enough deal or not to prevent me from doing something I love.