>The only thing stopping us from being done is in people's heads.
Of course. The actual political debate in the US is whether society should accept and normalize daily mass death. If we applied today’s standards, 9/11 would have been a non-issue. It’s only about a days worth of covid deaths, after all.
No amount of vaccination will avoid everyone getting infected sooner or later. The vaccinated who die will have died with vaccination mandates or without them. The unvaccinated who die fall into two groups. Those who would also have died vaccinated and those who do so as a consequence of their own choice. That's neither my business nor yours, it's theirs alone. We may argue with them, but we can't force them and claim to be more moral for it, quite the opposite in fact.
> Those who would also have died vaccinated and those who do so as a consequence of their own choice.
Their choice has a direct effect on society and causes harm to other people. So no it's not as a simple as.
I guess we could deny the unvaccinated medical care in hospitals. Because they take up ressources that would be spent on people with other medical issues. We have an about 70% vaccination rate and 80-90% of hospitalized covid patients are unvaccinated. Meanwhile I know of people that can't get standard procedures done because of covid patients (this wasn't a problem before the pandemic).
Due to EMTALA, hospitals are legally required to care for any patient who arrives in unstable condition regardless of vaccination status. But I would encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated as it reduces the risk of hospitalization.
An overworked ER Nurse who just can't take it anymore may decide to not update a patient's medical record when a patient is in decline and instead will simply discharge the patient. If the Patient dies at home, the medical records will not indicate a decline, therefore no EMTALA violation. That is how my Mother was basically manslaughtered by West Hills, CA ER back in March of 2018, right in front of my own eyes. I still have PTSD from the incident. After Mom died at home in my arms without ever having been treated for her pre-pnemonia, NOBODY would investigate. How cruel and complicit is that?
Your comment implicitly assumes that vaccination is the only possible way to reduce death, but we have many other interventions that we can choose to prioritize as a society:
* Mandate a minimum # of nurses and pay them fairly. Patient survival depends on nurses being able to do their jobs, but hospitals seem to prefer saving money by cutting staff.
* Improve society’s overall health by reducing inequality. Lives have intrinsic value that transcends any economic or profit-based calculus. We consider mass death unacceptable because we recognize this basic truth.
* Make paid sick days and short-term disability more accessible. It can take weeks to months to properly recover, depending on severity.
* New building regulations in public spaces to lower the viral inoculum (correlated with severity) using tactics such as improved ventilation and 222nm UV lamps.
* Ensure access to the basic necessities: healthy food, housing, healthcare. You can’t survive a covid infection if you’re dying of exposure on the street.
>Your comment implicitly assumes that vaccination is the only possible way to reduce death
No, this was a discussion about 1. the claim by others that vaccination would be the key to "end" all of this and 2. my complaint that not a single cent of many 100s of billions my government spent on all of this went into health care.
I would very much have liked if we had spent more money on nurses, and into making their work as easy as possible by allowing them to concentrate on their core competencies and offload the easier parts of the jobs onto more nursing assistants, which can be trained relatively quickly. Alas, we didn't, and here we are!
Of course. The actual political debate in the US is whether society should accept and normalize daily mass death. If we applied today’s standards, 9/11 would have been a non-issue. It’s only about a days worth of covid deaths, after all.