Originally Posted by lkagele (Post 2003882)

And the good thing is, those difficult to believe stories from NPR are being funded by your tax dollars.

Originally Posted by merrymini (Post 2004251)

Are you proposing a hospital for infectious disease, one for heart attacks, one for car accidents? You cannot possibly be serious.

Originally Posted by Topspinmo (Post 2004081)

Yes we had to save big bird.

Originally Posted by kendi (Post 2004269)

Capacity doesn’t necessarily mean the hospital is full. It also includes the hospital’s ability to serve patient’s based on the number of staff. And as we all know there is a shortage of staff and it’s only getting worse. But the media sure loves to push the panic button in those who swallow their pill.

Originally Posted by holger danske (Post 2003821)

No. It's a shoddy journalism issue. NPR is a news source relied on by many people. Yet they chose to run an article without adequate investigation to drive a certain agenda. Where in the article does it say the family contacted 43 hospitals but were turned away because of lack of space. The only hospital contacted said he needed specialized care not available there. I'm just calling BS on NPR. Don't turn it into a vax issue.

Originally Posted by Laker14 (Post 2004306)

Not a separate facility for car accidents and heart attacks. That would be unnecessary. I'm suggesting a paradigm shift that separates infectious disease from non-infectious medical procedures. This would reduce drastically the iatrogenic source of infectious disease spread.
And yes, I'm deadly serious.
In the long run it would save lives and money.

Originally Posted by thelegges (Post 2004602)

I lost count long time ago, on how many times I was notified days or weeks later, that I was exposed, something infectious.

Patients don’t come with bar codes, and sometimes aren’t diagnosed with issues for days. Nothing unusual to be notified the patient you did a procedure 8 days ago Has just been diagnosed with TB.

Then you get the “We understand TB precautions were not used during this procedure, and you will need to be tested.” 40 year’s of being exposed to pretty much anything you can think of, gives you a different perspective on reality of working in healthcare. Sometimes the wheels on the bus are not present until it’s too late.

Your idea only works if every patient was tested for any possible issue, then wait for days or weeks for results before being admitted.

Sir I am sorry you are in CHF, trauma from accident, internal bleeding, but we need to make sure you don’t have anything infectious before you can come thru our doors. So in your ideal hospital, money would be saved, but lives would definitely be lost.

Originally Posted by Laker14 (Post 2004609)

I appreciate your response, and your years of first hand experience in the trenches. You know more about this than I, obviously. I see your point, that in critical emergency situations, and in triage, patients have to be treated without the benefit of knowing if they are infectious or not. But isn't your scenario similar to riding a bus, subway or going to an indoor concert. I'm not suggesting that separating infectious from non-infectious care will provide total isolation, but doesn't it make sense that once known, outside of the realm of emergent critical care, such separation would serve to reduce cross infection from inside the facility?

Originally Posted by blueash (Post 2003916)

May I summarize? Holger comes on TOTV and starts a thread entitled

I'll take "Things that never happened" for $800, Alex. where he says the NPR story is made up, it never happened because ..reasons..

Several people fact check Holger and find, amazingly, that the NPR story is fully supported by the dead person's obituary and the state Health Dept.

The facts seem to be that the man presented to an ER in a hospital that could not manage his heart attack. The ER called 43 hospitals before they finally found one that would accept him as a patient, and he was transferred. He died in that out of state hospital from his heart attack. Had there been a closer place with an open ICU or CCU bed perhaps he lives, perhaps not. But the NPR story, the obituary and the other evidence is that the events as reported actually happened.

I am waiting for Holger to return and explain why he is attacking NPR, which in this case was 100% reliable, but is leaving his reliability in serious question by not retracting his assertion or further documenting why he believes he is right that this never happened. I can report that NPR does make mistakes, and when they are aware of them they make corrections. Will Holger do the same??

Originally Posted by Rosebud1949 (Post 2004280)

take all the non vaxers with covid , send them to a hospital with non vaxxed staff for treatment. Take all kids whose parents do not want them to wear a mask and send them to a school where the staff are not vaxxed. Then leave us sensible folk alone to try and survive these people"s total disregard for anyone who cares about their fellow man.

Btw you can send anti vaxxers the medicals bills for spreading covid.

Then perhaps the insurance companies will finally come to their senses and decided if you are not vaxxed that you should pay a higher premium.

Originally Posted by holger danske (Post 2003821)

No. It's a shoddy journalism issue. NPR is a news source relied on by many people. Yet they chose to run an article without adequate investigation to drive a certain agenda. Where in the article does it say the family contacted 43 hospitals but were turned away because of lack of space. The only hospital contacted said he needed specialized care not available there. I'm just calling BS on NPR. Don't turn it into a vax issue.

Originally Posted by holger danske (Post 2004380)

As the OP I take exception to your twice posted accusation that I did not read the NPR
article. Not only did I read it but I read the WP article on which it was based and Ray's obit as well as other articles on Cullman and Rush Hospital.
From the WP article I learned that Ray's daughter who was quoted was Jeopardy fan hence the not so clever reference in my post's title to Jeopardy.

I also notice some discrepancies between the two, for example- NPR article "DeMonia's daughter, Raven DeMonia, told The Washington Post that it was "shocking" when the hospital told the family there were no ICU beds anywhere near Cullman, a town of about 16,000 some 50 miles north of Birmingham.” and the WP article “Raven DeMonia, his daughter, told The Washington Post on Sunday that it was “shocking” when the family was told that dozens of ICUs were unable to treat her father.
Now you may feel that is a distinction without a difference but I do not. I believe it was changed to subtly influence readers to buy the premise of their story.

Nowhere in either article does it say Cullman had no ICU beds available or that Ray was denied one there. The hospital spokesperson merely confirmed he was a patient there and that “The level of care he required was not available at Cullman Regional.” (Sort of sounds like the Villages Hospital that routinely airlifts patients to Leesburg) I think that neither article mentioning whether Ray was in an ICU bed or a regular bed is telling. If he was denied an ICU bed it would have been included at it would fit the agenda.
WP article mentions a “specialized cardiac ICU bed” was needed. Rush Hospital in Meridien has a a facility called The Specialty Hospital of Meridian … a 49 bed facility providing acute-level care for patients suffering from medically complex illnesses. Sort of fits Ray’s profile considering he had a stroke in 2020 requiring hospitalization in Birmingham some 50 miles from Cullman.
Yes his obit says "Due to covid-19....." but placement of any information in any obit does not rise to the level requiring journalistic standards and an article using such info is merely bootstrapping to support their argument. I notice that neither the hospital nor the other authorities quoted concede that this particular transfer was caused by overcrowding.
So in sum, I did read the articles, I used a not so clever title gleaned from them and I found their headlines and the tenor of the article agenda driven and to constitute shoddy journalism.
Feel free to swallow what you will.

Originally Posted by roscoguy (Post 2004955)

Well, if you read the NPR story, you got something completely different than I did. You are absolutely right, the article didn't say that Cullman had no beds, it said that the needed level of care wasn't available there and that "Due to COVID 19, CRMC emergency staff contacted 43 hospitals in 3 states in search of a Cardiac ICU bed and finally located one in Meridian, MS.", which the NPR article did indeed quote directly from Mr. DeMonia's obituary.
However, I still can't understand what you feel "never happened" or was misrepresented in the NPR story. Do you have reason to believe that there were ICU beds available or, conversely, that the hospitals contacted were not at or near ICU capacity, at least in part due to COVID patients? More quotes from the article, from sources other than an obituary: "ICU capacity in Alabama has been maxed out in recent weeks, and COVID-19 patients occupy about half of the intensive care beds, according to Johns Hopkins University."
And this:
"Speaking last week, Dr. Scott Harris, the head of the Alabama Department of Public Health, said the state was continuing to experience "a real crisis" with ICU bed capacity."
I still see no "shoddy journalism" at all. :shrug: :confused: