Welcome to DeSantis' Florida -- ICU hell Inside a Covid I.C.U., Hopes Fade as Patients Surge In Doctors and nurses in a Florida hospital thought the onslaught of coronavirus admissions had ended. Now they need more intensive care beds. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/us/coronavirus-florida-hospitals.html Dr. Michael DesRosiers, center, prepared to see an intubated patient with Covid-19 at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami last week. MIAMI — Alix Zacharski, a nurse manager, went to check on one of her patients inside the Covid-19 intensive care unit at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital on a recent afternoon, hoping that the patient, who had been struggling to breathe on her own, would be a little better. But these days inside the Covid I.C.U., almost everything is worse. The week before, Ms. Zacharski’s team had lost a 24-year-old mother whose entire family had contracted the coronavirus. The woman, like every other patient in the Covid I.C.U., had been unvaccinated. Ms. Zacharski reached the sliding doors of her patient’s room and peered inside. “We intubated her?” she asked a doctor. “When? This morning?” “Yesterday afternoon,” he said. “Jesus,” Ms. Zacharski said, her voice a near-whisper. Covid-19 patients have never stopped arriving at Medical I.C.U.-B., the unit that Ms. Zacharski has tended since March 2020. But the onslaught of admissions had slowed. For a glorious period, the unit had shrunk to three patients. The end of the pandemic seemed within reach. Now patients fill the I.C.U.’s eight beds again. A second unit, with 50 additional beds, opened this week. Alix Zacharski, a nurse manager at Jackson, said she could not get her head around having to treat patients in the Covid I.C.U. who are the same age as her adult children. The resurgence of the coronavirus has burdened hospitals anew across the country, with a rush of patients fueled by the virus’s virulent Delta variant catching doctors off guard. Florida has reported the highest daily average hospitalizations in the nation, 36 for every 100,000 people over the past two weeks, according to data compiled by The New York Times. In Jacksonville, hospitals have more Covid patients than ever before, despite the availability of vaccines. Health workers like Ms. Zacharski feel disbelief that they must endure another surge. She remains tired from the previous one. And she cannot get her head around having to treat patients the same age as her adult children who are gasping for breath because of a preventable infection. Last year, Ms. Zacharski feared the unknown. How bad would SARS-CoV-2 be? Could doctors treat it? What would the darkest days of the pandemic look like? Now she is armed with hard-earned knowledge from the past 14 months — and vaccinated, as a sticker on her hospital badge boasts. But the virus continues to move into uncharted territory. “We are scared of seeing what we saw, and this time affecting the younger population,” she said. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire career.” Jackson, Florida’s largest public hospital, had 232 Covid-19 patients on Friday, still half the 485 it had on July 27, 2020, its pandemic peak. But a sharp rise in recent hospitalizations prompted administrators to limit visitors and warn that more stringent measures could soon be necessary. About 61 percent of Miami-Dade County residents are fully vaccinated, higher than the state average of 49 percent. Miami-Dade holds one of the highest vaccination rates among the nation’s large, socially vulnerable counties, those characterized by high poverty rates, crowded housing and poor access to transportation. But even high vaccine coverage may hide large gaps in immunity — among younger or working people, for example, who are vaccinated at lower rates — that can trigger outbreaks, said Jennifer B. Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Carlos Migoya, Jackson’s chief executive, said the vaccination rate among the hospital’s employees — 60 percent as of Thursday — was too low, a problem plaguing many hospitals, which have started to mandate the shots. At Jackson, 91 percent of third-year resident physicians have been vaccinated but only 37 percent of patient care technicians. Jackson has also admitted some vaccinated people, but almost all have been transplant patients with compromised immune systems. During last week’s visit by a reporter and photographer from The New York Times, none were in the I.C.U. Inside the hospital’s main Covid ward, known as South Wing 7, Victor Suero, 34, shared a room with another young man, a privacy curtain drawn between their beds. A loud pump sucked air out through the window to create negative pressurization. Two days earlier, Mr. Suero, a power lineman with a mermaid tattoo on his right arm, had run a 102.5-degree fever. He had been recovering from leg surgery and called his doctor, who told him to get to the Jackson emergency room, where he tested positive. Mr. Suero said he had not gotten vaccinated for several reasons: He lived until recently in a less densely populated part of Pennsylvania. His mother and sister were vaccinated. And he felt protected by his youth and generally good health. “I just thought, I’m a healthy person, so I don’t need to go and get it right away,” he said from his bed, four boxes of apple juice on his lunch tray. “I’m just not really for it.” His illness still felt like a “really bad cold,” he said, but he worried it would interfere with other surgeries he needs: “It has been a pain in the butt to deal with this.” In retrospect, did he wish he had gotten a vaccine? “Honestly, I still feel the same,” Mr. Suero said. “Maybe so that I don’t have any more complications with my leg and surgeries coming up — that would probably be the only reason why I would get vaccinated. But had it not been for this, I probably wouldn’t be looking to get vaccinated.” However, he added: “I hope nobody else gets Covid, ’cause it sucks.” In the Covid I.C.U., no patients could speak because all eight of them — six under the age of 50 — were intubated. Monitors beeped. A box lay on the floor, stuffed with bags of clear fluid to clean kidneys should they start to fail. Posters outlined tips on how to turn patients prone on their stomachs to help them breathe. A year ago, to avoid contagion from going into patient rooms, cables stretched to IV monitors in the hall, Ms. Zacharski recalled. Doctors and nurses wore protective suits that made them look like astronauts. Now the equipment remained inside, and the staff dressed in scrubs and N-95 masks. Ms. Zacharski, 52, came to Florida seven years ago from Michigan. She had immigrated as a young woman from Colombia, married a man from Poland, learned Polish and raised two Michiganders, now 28 and 29. She paused outside the room of the woman Dr. Jheison Giraldo had intubated the previous afternoon. Dr. Giraldo recalled cracking jokes with the woman, trying to ease her anxiety as she gulped for air on her second day in the I.C.U. “I was trying to make her feel lighthearted,” he said. “I got her to smile. And then a couple of hours later, she’s almost falling asleep because she couldn’t breathe.” “It’s terrible to watch,” Dr. Giraldo added. “It’s like watching somebody drown. It’s horrible.” Ms. Zacharski lingered on the thought. “It’s the worst feeling ever,” she said. “When you watch somebody looking at you like, ‘I can’t breathe, help me.’ And that’s the worst image that I have in my mind. I never forget it.” Then she took a breath and looked in on the next patient.
But DeSantis! Cases in Florida! Cases! COVID deaths REPORTED (not occurred) in the past week by age: Under 16: 0 16-29: 4 30-39: 6 40-49: 28 50-59: 60 60-64: 38 65+: 273 Total: 409 (avg 58/day) Report says 108 actually died in the last week
Massive spike in reported increase of COVID-19 deaths was skewed by old data A massive 300 percent hike in nationwide COVID-19 deaths recorded Friday by Johns Hopkins University was skewed by states dumping data – that in one case dated back as far as last spring, according to a report. The university, which has been a trusted source of coronavirus information since the start of the pandemic, reported that US deaths surged from 321 on Thursday to 891 on Friday, as the Delta variant quickly spreads throughout much of the country. Florida was responsible for a huge chunk of the increase, with 409 of Friday’s death toll coming from that state, according to The Daily Mail. However, Florida only releases weekly data on Friday, making the day-to-day totals reported by the university unclear and overblown, the outlet said. Figures released by Delaware also added to the surging daily increase, as that state announced 130 new deaths Friday, the tabloid reported. The dramatic figure was misleading because those deaths actually occurred between mid-May 2020 and late last month, and were added after The First State reviewed death certificates, according to the article.
As I've been saying all along, its seasonality. I called the summer spike back in May, and here it is. Now I'm going to tell you when it begins to fade: What's more, if the UK, India and US all have similar low to high time frame (as does Florida) despite very different approaches to lock down and masks then it is conceivable that lockdown and mask mandates simply do not work. Calling the week betwen 8/7 and 8/15 as the seasonal peak. Why? Because virus.
So every new recent day in Florida brings a new record for cases and hospitalizations but Tsing Tao does not want to talk about this. Nor does he want to talk about how we can only get this data from the Feds since Ron DeSantis no longer allows the reporting of daily COVID data in Florida despite hitting new peaks every day. Florida Covid hospitalizations shatter record as DeSantis downplays threat https://www.politico.com/states/flo...r-record-as-desantis-downplays-threat-1389356