What an absolute fucking diasaster.  Masks have gotten so much attention, but how much more critical was the late test rollout?  46 days it took us longer than Thailand to produce useable tests thanks to CDC hubris an idiocy.  “Lindstrom warned superiors that dropping N3 might lead to missed cases of infection, false negatives. Villanueva told colleagues that the design was of “Nobel quality,” according to those familiar with the matter.”  The lead scientists were worried about getting an f-ing Nobel prize instead of being pragmatic.

We’ll never know what difference it might have made to get tests out in a timely manner.  By the time the US was able to test, Covid was so widespread, particularly in California, Washington, New York, and probably a couple other northeast states, that containment, a la Korea, was out of the question.  “Flattening the curve” was the only remaining option.  We’ll never know how many lives were lost, how much of our country’s reputation, how much negative economic impact was caused by this debacle.

I still believe this is epidemic-light.  There is another, worse epidemic coming.  I sincerely hope we can learn from these errors.  Will the CDC do better next time?  Let’s hope so.  Please don’t forget that the first positive COVID test in the US was *illegally* obtained in Washington against CDC guidelines.  (This is the same CDC, don’t forget, that was, while failing to produce tests, actively advising AGAINST mask-wearing.)

This is a book waiting to be written.  Honestly, there will be a cover-up, but if someone could get to the bottom of this, you could easily write a book JUST covering the testing debacle.

Honestly, I think if you work in a long-term care facility and refuse to get vaccinated, you should find another job.  The government should provide financial support and assistance to allow long-term care facilities to increase salaries to replace those to refuse to get vaccinated and support those who do and want to stay.

Nearly 72% of certified nursing assistants say they don’t want to be vaccinated, a recent survey found.

The federal long-term-care vaccination program, led by CVS Health Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., will begin its broad rollout in a dozen states this week, with hundreds of facilities slated for visits during the next few days. But surveys have signaled that many staffers are reluctant to get the shots, and some already have been declining them in the limited number of facilities where vaccinations have been administered.

At the nursing home at John Knox Village, in Pompano Beach, Fla., which became one of the first U.S. facilities to get the vaccine last Wednesday, about one-third of staffers participated, according to Mark Raynor, director of health-care services.

Unbelievable.  The thing is, you have to vaccinate the people working at nursing homes.  The in-and-out is just too rapid for the residents.  I read life expectancy when you enter a nursing home is only five months.  It’s just not practical to assume you can vaccinate all those people with a vaccine that requires to shots a month apart.  I mean, that should happen, too, but it’s imperative that all staffers and all visitors have the vaccine.

I have to admit I was a little squirrely about the vaccine when it first was being developed six to eight months ago, simply because I was concerned about the speed of development, but you can call me a convert.  Got an extra Pfizer or Moderna vaccine?  I’m ready!  Let me know when and where!  Not only that, I feel like that could have / should have been even more aggressive about rolling the vaccine out to the most vulnerable.  The risk / benefit equation is very different for a ninety-year-old nursing home resident than it is for a thirty-year-old nurse, so the former should have gotten approval for the vaccine sooner.

Lawyers have said that employers are generally legally allowed to mandate Covid-19 vaccines for workers, a stance reinforced last week in guidelines released by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But nursing-home owners have said they don’t plan to require the vaccine. Many facilities are already facing staffing squeezes after months of pandemic challenges.

We are on vacation today.  It’s our first vacation of any kind in about a year, and of course the first since S arrived.  We’re only about 90 minutes from home except that an hour ferry wait made it 2.5 hours.  Frankly, the trip was pretty rough.  When you’re in line for the ferry, you’re inching along at a snail’s pace.  Because you’re moving, the baby has to stay in the car seat.  You can’t pull off and take a break anywhere or you’ll lose your place in line.  And S was fussing and crying and the kids were being annoying.  Yeah.  Finally, after being here a few hours and getting S to bed, I’m starting to feel a bit relaxed.  I don’t think vacationing with a baby is ever really all that relaxing.  We’re probably a couple years at least from a vacation that is in any way truly relaxing.  But still.  It’s good to get out of the house.

Today, my county moves to “Phase 2.”  One 5 person gathering per week is now permitted.  Retail stores can now reopen at limited capacity, and restaurants can open at 50% capacity.  Frankly, I have no interest in going to a retail store or a restaurant or a hair dresser, but I’m glad to see us reopening.  However, I’m mostly depressed because Covid cases and deaths are continuing to surge.  We had another record high number of cases today since early May, and deaths are up the last couple days as well.  The cause is unclear – if the contact tracers know, they aren’t saying.  Cases are apparently up in young people and Seattlites, but are not directly linked to the protests (not that I necessarily trust them to tell us if they were.)  There have been transmissions in households driving it apparently.  But why would there be any change in how Covid is getting transmitted *within* households?  That makes no sense.

I should really stay away from the news and DOH website for a few days.  Tracking this is not helping anyone.  Do I have the willpower to not go to a news website or the DOH website for the rest of our vacation?  I have literally not missed a day monitoring the DOH website since a couple weeks after this started.

And . . . here comes the surge.  It turns out that having tens of thousands of people congregate in close proximity all day long, up to 60,000, is not an awesome idea in the middle of a pandemic.  I said in my last entry that numbers were high that day but had otherwise been good.  Well, numbers have been high every day since then, and just jumped again today.  We’ve had (in my county) an average of 57 new cases per day over the last week as compared to 36 the week before, a 60% increase, and today we had 94 new cases, the first time we’ve had that many since the first week of May.

In my opinion, the government has lost the moral authority to impose restrictions.  They’ve permitted gatherings of tens of thousands while simultaneously forbidding people to leave their homes and have gatherings of even five people.  Now, gatherings of five – FIVE – people are permitted but most everything is still shut down.  And leaders are issuing supportive statements about the protests.  I’ve seen photos of socially distant protests elsewhere, but there has been nothing socially distant about them here.  Ug.  I’m just sick of all of this.

Also, apparently the Washington state DOH has been overcounting negative tests, meaning that they’ve been understating the percent positive tests.  Really?  Why are these people so incompetent?

It’s interesting to me how supporting government-run healthcare has become more or less standard for Democratic candidates.  I can’t argue that people – all people – should have access to healthcare, but I feel a lot of people don’t understand that what people get with government-run healthcare is not the same as what we get here.  I can mainly speak to Ireland and the UK, so that’s what I’ll talk to.

• If you are in the hospital in Ireland, you’ll likely find yourself on a ward.  If not, you’ll be sharing a room.  As far as I can tell, wards don’t even exist on US hospitals anymore, except maybe in the ICU or whatever.  Private rooms are not a standard thing like they are here.
• If you need some kind of treatment for something that’s not life-threatening, you’ll likely have to wait.  A long time.  Here’s a random example of an article on patients waiting 9 months or more to get shots for macular degeneration.  I didn’t KNOW that people had to wait a long time for that treatment, but I guessed they did.  My dad has macular degeneration, and it’s terribly time-critical to get treated.
• When my American grandma got cataracts, she made an appointment and got them removed.  When my Irish great-aunt got cataracts, she got put on a waiting list, and a year later, she got them removed.
• In Ireland, people unsatisfied with public health care pay for private health insurance.  15% of health care expenditures came from private insurance, and 40% of Irish people have some type of private insurance.  My aunt found a lump in her breast.  She was unsatisfied with the care she was getting from the public healthcare system, so she sought private treatment and surgery to have it removed.
• Healthcare is like an HMO.  I’ve enjoyed being on a PPO for over a decade.  As a kid, my parents had an HMO which was super annoying because you couldn’t just go see a doctor if you had a problem.  You needed a referral.  Not a huge deal, but public healthcare tends to follow the HMO model – your GP is a gatekeeper.
• Education requirements are WAY less to qualify as a doctor in other countries outside the US.  It takes five years to qualify as a doctor in Ireland.  In five to six years, you can qualify as a surgeon or specialist.  That’s out of high school, folks.  I actually think this is a good thing, but unless the model is changed, doctors here are going to expect to be paid more.
• GPs in Ireland make $77,000 a year.  GPs in the US average between $140,000 and $190,000 a year, depending on the source.  And we have trouble finding enough GPs even at that salary level.
• As far as I can tell, Medicare is great in the US.  But the rest of us are subsidizing it heavily.  Not only that, I’d assert that the US subsidizes healthcare around the world through paying through the nose for pharmaceuticals and advanced operations and equipment not available elsewhere.  New treatments are debuted in the US, and after they’ve been shown to work well, they move to the rest of the world.  A random example of British kids trying to get to the US for cutting edge cancer treatment.  Cancer treatment is very effective in Europe, but many of those effective treatments were developed and paid for here.
• Despite the fact that a full 12% of Americans are uninsured, cancer survival rates are comparable between the US and Europe.  12% of Americans don’t even have healthcare, but survival rates are the same.  Why?  Shouldn’t they be much higher in Europe?  (It varies with type of cancer; for some types, survival rates are higher in the US, others higher in Europe, but comes out roughly even overall.)

I honestly believe healthcare will not be any cheaper whatsoever if we go to governement-run healthcare in the US.  I suspect that globally, the rate of advancements in healthcare will declines.  I would LOVE to see the US stop subsidizing drugs for the rest of the world, and perhaps government run healthcare would enable that.  I do believe it’s a moral obligation of this country to provide healthcare to all its citizens.  I’m not sure Medicare for all is the way to do that.  Maybe it is.  If Medicare for all IS the right answer, I definitely would be in favor of a gradual expansion – gradually reduce the eligibility age and add in children at the same time.  So, year one, move eligibility to age 55 and also make all children under 1 eligible.  People could still retain private insurance if they wished, but I imagine many or most wouldn’t.  Private insurance would experience a slow decline over the next 30 years while it adapted to a role more similar to that which it plays in Europe.