Replies to post #350712 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Nobody Accurately Tracks Health Care Workers Lost to COVID-19. So She Stays Up At Night Cataloging the Dead.

"How Many People in the U.S. Are Hospitalized With COVID-19? Who Knows?"


Yann Kebbi, special to ProPublica

Anesthesiologist Claire Rezba started tracking lost health workers almost instinctively. Researchers and industry professionals say the lack of good official data on these deaths is “scandalous” and is putting lives in danger.

by Nina Martin Aug. 2, 5 a.m. EDT

When police discovered the woman, she’d been dead at home for at least 12 hours, alone except for her 4-year-old daughter. The early reports said only that she was 42, a mammogram technician at a hospital southwest of Atlanta and almost certainly a victim of COVID-19. Had her identity been withheld to protect her family’s privacy? Her employer’s reputation? Anesthesiologist Claire Rezba, scrolling through the news on her phone, was dismayed. “I felt like her sacrifice was really great and her child’s sacrifice was really great, and she was just this anonymous woman, you know? It seemed very trivializing.” For days, Rezba would click through Google, searching for a name, until in late March, the news stories finally supplied one: Diedre Wilkes. And almost without realizing it, Rezba began to keep count.

The next name on her list was world-famous, at least in medical circles: James Goodrich, a pediatric neurosurgeon in New York City and a pioneer in the separation of twins conjoined at the head. One of his best-known successes happened in 2016, when he led a team of 40 people in a 27-hour procedure to divide the skulls and detach the brains of 13-month-old brothers. Rezba, who’d participated in two conjoined-twins cases during her residency, had been riveted by that saga. Goodrich’s death on March 30 was a gut-punch; “it just felt personal.” Clearly, the coronavirus was coming for health care professionals, from the legends like Goodrich to the ones like Wilkes who toiled out of the spotlight and, Rezba knew, would die there.

[...]

A preprint study out of Italy last week hinted at the kind of lessons researchers and policy makers might glean if they had more complete data about health care workers in the U.S. The study pooled data from occupational medical centers in six Italian cities, where more than 10,000 doctors, nurses and other providers were tested for coronavirus from March to early May. Along with basic demographic information, the data included job title, the facility and department where the employee worked, the type of PPE used and self-reported COVID-19 symptoms.

The most important findings: Working in a designated COVID-19 ward didn’t put workers at greater risk of infection, while wearing a mask “appeared to be the single most effective approach” to keeping them safe.

In the U.S., many medical facilities are similarly monitoring employee infections and deaths and adjusting policies accordingly. But for the most part, that information isn’t being made public, which makes it impossible to see the bigger picture, or for systems to learn from each other’s experiences, to better protect their workers.

[...]

The near-term consequences have also been enormous. The lack of public data about health care workers and deaths may have contributed to a dangerous complacency as infections have surged in the South and West, Friese said — for example, the idea that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than other common respiratory viruses. “I’ve been at this for 23 years. I’ve never seen so many health care workers stricken in my career. This whole idea that it’s just like the flu probably set us back quite a way.”

He sees similar misconceptions about PPE: “If we had a better understanding of the number of health care workers infected, it might help our policymakers recognize the PPE remains inadequate and they need to redouble their efforts. … People are still MacGyvering and wrapping themselves in trash bags. If we’re reusing N95 respirators, we haven’t solved the problem. And until we solve that, we’re going to continue to see the really tragic results that we’re seeing.”

The misconceptions appeared to stretch to the highest reaches of the federal government, even as infections and deaths started surging again. At a White House event in July focused on reopening schools in the fall, HHS secretary Alex Azar told the people gathered, “health care workers … don’t get infected because they take appropriate precautions.”

Even some medical workers have continued to be in denial. A few days before Azar spoke, Twitter was abuzz over an Alabama nurse who worked the COVID-19 floor at a hospital by day and decompressed at crowded bars by night, where she often went maskless. “I work in the health care industry,” she was quoted as saying, “so I feel like I probably won’t get it if I haven’t gotten it by now.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/nobody-accurately-tracks-health-care-workers-lost-to-covid-19-so-she-stays-up-at-night-cataloging-the-dead

[hookrider]

fuagf: What did people expect. Trump had his dirty little hands in it! Like everything Trump touches it turns to shit. Because he is a Big POS.

[Dale C]

Coronavirus Cases

U.S.
Confirmed Cases 4,771,087
Fatal Cases 156,806
Recovered Cases 1,528,979

Texas
Confirmed Cases 451,181
Fatal Cases 7,259
Recovered Cases 306,262
Updated 8/06/2020 from ECDC, WHO, and local government sites

I just read that every 80 seconds someone in the US dies from the virus over the last 7 days. Texas overall is doing much better but we had a late start and management is doing their best to catch us up with the national average.