every single one of you is ultimately going to die of respiratory failure....and cardiac failure....every one of you...me included...
if your hospital is lucky, you will also have COVID, and they will get paid between 11 to 17k by the gov't, per patient, once you are put under "COVID" on their stat sheet...
are treading on "Captain Obvious" territory, but I suspect that you miss the 'name of the game', which is using our acquired knowledge and skill to "extend" this amazing experience of life, in both quantity and quality.
Link: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-covid-19-death-count/
involved for the hospital for taking care of COVID patients....where's there's money there's fraud, or in this case "a particularly advantageous way for the health system to present the data...."
assigning the cause of death is, and has always been, flawed...before and after COVID....Very few elderly patients die without competing causes of mortality...at some point, a physician or coder gets to choose what goes on the death certificate...and signs it...then it becomes gospel, and a permanent part of the record....we don't do autopsies anymore...
if you had 6 diagnosis' in your medical record, all that could cause death, which one do you choose...? the worst one...? the most recent one...? the one at the very end...? so it's always been "captain obvious" to state "respiratory failure" or "cardiac failure"....that's why these causes of death appear the most frequently...
illnesses and underlying causes of death...as we (including you) get into the "zone" we often find ourselves in "organ recitals" ;-)...the point I am making is that COVID-19 deaths are shortening - sometimes dramatically so - lives of even this group. Had it not been for the advent of COVID, many of these people could have gone on for 10, 20 or even 30 years - with those morbidities.
To illustrate this point, I'd like to share a couple of personal experiences...
1) "Uncle Earl" (btw, do a board search with my username and keyword "Uncle Earl" to get a fuller story on this incredible ND alum)
Uncle Earl lived to be 96 yrs old, but I only had the pleasure of knowing him for his last 25 years or so...during that time I learned that he had a heart valve replacement in his 60's, and another one later on..plus a few other maladies...so if COVID-19 had come along earlier, he - and the literally hundreds of other friends and family - could have been denied the pleasure of many more rewarding years.
2) My 'Mother-in-Law', would you believe...this lady also lived to be 96, and those years were fully lived...she too had a heart condition, but somewhere in her 80's we began to run out of birthday gift ideas, so we asked here what she might like...her response?..."A chainsaw"! ;-)...true story...this made sense to us because she would always be driving up to the family cabin in the Sierra foothills to clear out the underbrush. There were other times we would ask what she was up to (again in her late 80's and early 90's)...her response..."Oh, just going down to the Senior Center to "help out the old folks"...you hopefully get where I'm going here.
It is not our call to 'write off' anyone, at any age, by failing to try and extend a life that is threatened by COVID-19.
to name calling and bullying... ;-). I'm in a cohort that can die anyday (as we all are, in actuality)....I appreciate the nice stories about your family.., may you and I live as long as God will allow...
to be fair, it's a bit of an emotional response to say that my comments are "writing people off". Older and sick people do die, and the vast majority dying of COVID do not have 10, 20 or 30 years to live as you say... The average age of death of COVID is 74 which is just a year or two below the average age of death due to all other causes (76)... so it's not a stretch to say that this is a disease of the sick and elderly, and saying so, doesn't make someone a non-caring individual or conspiracy theorist...
I would give you a different postulate....as a community of believers, is it right to make sure we can squeeze every last heart beat out of our our elderly, where we already spend an inordinate percentage of health care costs, when countless others in our community don't have basic needs...?
I see this with my liberal friends, who are willing to make 95% of the population sacrifice (in some cases everything) to make sure we protect the 5% or less truly susceptible to this disease. This is actually a selfish position under the guise of magnanimity.
So I'm elderly, and I want to hold 10M kids out of school just in CA alone, 10M kids who will never get those years back in socialization and education, 10M parents who had to leave/lose their jobs just so I can assure that the most susceptible in our population doesn't succumb to this illness....? 6 kids under the age of 18 have died of COVID in CA....6....so the isolation and lockdowns are in order to prevent secondary spread to those at risk....many see this as an appropriate trade off...I don't.....we just disagree on this as I do with many of my colleagues...
My point in my past posts is simply that using the cause of death tally due to COVID, which is being paraded daily as a fear-mongering warning to all, is poorly understood and absolutely being over-reported. Hospitals do not do cause of death analysis well...
by the way, regarding your post below, the Spanish flu infected 500M and killed 50M, indiscriminate of age....there's no comparison with COVID
>Glad you liked the stories...again, they are illustrative of the fact that even the "vulnerable" cohort can have decades of impactful lives remaining, not just for themselves, but for their families and friends...and for others...who do you suppose represents a significant proportion of the staffing at your local Food Bank, Salvation Army or Red Cross facility?...you guessed it...retirees; many of them in their 80's or 90's, and all of them could be classed as "essential workers"...certainly their 'customers' would agree...disadvantaged families with little kids showing up every week of the year. I know this first hand since my wife and I have been there every week helping to make 300 lunches for the last dozen years or so...as part of a crew that has welcomed the assistance of several 90 year olds.
BTW, I'm not putting the 'onus' on God for how long we live...that's on us to use our 'God-given' talents to maintain/extend our lives.
>Let me boil this second paragraph down...you're an attending physician in the hospital's ER...a patient shows up with an unrelenting cough, fever and difficulty breathing...all signs of COVID-19...the 'check-in' staff notes that the patient is 77 years old...your quick response is "our charts say you should have been dead last year..."Next"!
Clearly, the 'stories' had no impact on you.
>You are extrapolating in this paragraph...no one is asking for 'extreme measures' in treatment...just the same care as any other patient, regardless of age...btw, most everyone I know has signed "DNRs" (i.e. Do Not Resuscitate forms).
What you're really getting to is the very real case of overwhelmed hospitals being forced to make gut-wrenching triage decisions that could often involve age, because too large a segment of our society thinks 'mitigation efforts' are too bothersome and we should just let "natural herd immunity" take its course. BTW, this scenario will not always be to the detriment of those 65 and over...right now we have over 60,000 deaths in the younger, working age group; many with unknown 'vulnerabilities'. I'm not sure that they and their families would appreciate your "strategy" for dealing with COVID-19.
>Wow!...i've got to complement you on 'coming clean' with what you believe in. You might want to stop for a moment and realize that it isn't just your liberal friends who are advocating masks, social distancing, hand washings, take-out dinners, TV only sporting events and other draconian measures...the political and HC leaders of virtually all nations on earth are implementing the same recommendations...and I'll go out on a limb to claim that they are not all liberal.
Vaccines are coming...all these measures are temporary (if observed), so repeat this phrase when you're feeling stressed..."Jobs will return...COVID victims won't".
>OK, so now we get to the end of your rope...5% of our population (i.e. the Elderly), of which you (currently) have no affiliation with, are messing with the lives of the other 95%...therefore, let's all get back to normal and let those folks deal with the consequences...did I miss something?
>re: COVID death reporting...I'm hesitant to bother our very busy family ID and ICU Docs over message board debates, but if you'd like, I'll try to get their first hand opinions on the accuracies of death certificates...let me know.
>Finally, wrt the 1918 Epidemic v. COVID...check out the link...you might want to take this into consideration...as well as the photos from 1918.
So where do we go from here?...My advice to you is to accept that the temporary restrictions are meant to save lives while keeping as much of society functioning as possible, and we need to 'get familiar' with such measures. This pathogen is already mutating and there will certainly be new ones in the future...as history has shown us, there is high likelihood that they will attack today's low-to-zero vulnerability cohorts (e.g. 1918 Epidemic)...trust in the professionals who devote their own lives to protecting YOU.
Link: https://www.contagionlive.com/view/new-analysis-shows-1918-flu-covid19-had-similar-mortality-impacts
"Zoom Party" with all our friends who will be falling asleep long before midnight ;-) (it is what it is).
that are taught in Catholic grade school.
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I just wanted to get those out there since I hadn't seen them posted.
but you clearly do not work in healthcare....right now, a prostate patient who 2 yrs after diagnosis, now with bone mets, falls and breaks his hip, is admitted, gets a PE, subsequent pneumonia, goes on a respirator and dies of "COVID"....of course he also had a past med hx of CABG, PVD, etc....his 6 other DRG's don't matter to the resident who pronounced him dead, or the hospital coder...you don't get more resources from the gov't for prostate patients....you get paid to say COVID....this is how it works....you don't know what you're talking about....
it doesn't mean that some healthy people with no other medical problems don't die of COVID...they do....but in shockingly low numbers....more than 2/3 of patients who died of "COVID" would had died if you gave them a ham sandwich...because they have a history of multiple medical problems and they're dying....when the resident goes to the unit at 2 am to pronounce the patient dead, and sign the death certificate, they are not doing a search through a voluminous medical record to actually discover that the real cause of death was his prostate cancer....6 diagnosis's ago....
so instead, they do what most physicians do, assign respiratory or cardiac failure....which is consistently the true cause of death in 100% of people who die....you stop breathing and your heart stops....at the very end, we will all die of COVID like symptoms of respiratory distress and heart failure...whether you have COVID or not....
I love this. 100% does not leave much wiggle room.
No one ever dies, say, in explosions or fires or falls or electrocutions. Hiroshima? All died due to respiratory or cardiac failure, I guess. Crushed instantly under masonry in an earthquake? No, that couldn't be.
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