Reality has a good way of kicking people in the teeth. We find ourselves dealing with a global problem. C-19 has a 1% mortality rate amongst those 65 and older, people who have heart+lung problems along with some other immune system problems. It doesn't seem to have an impact on children 15 and under. Although, a 14 year old boy did catch it. But women are giving birth to healthy babies even though the mother has it.

In the western world the mortality rate is getting this low because of medical care and the treatment for Malaria is showing to be a cure or at least a major reduction possibility. "Never let a good tragedy go to waste", is the saying when it comes to politics. Political power plays are being made by the so called "Democratic Socialist" (Fascist/Communist highbred), Eleatests (once called Robber Barons), Technocracy (science/tech corporations) and the others who are over shadowed right now.

Some are wanting to use C-19 to kill off those that it will to remove the burden of those people on society. Yes, there's the standard, "rip=off the tax payers". Everyone know that by now. By the summer this will be in the past. The question will be, "How much is the world f'cked-up?"

Part of the reason may also be people quarantined. There is no 'one reason' to pinpoint.

If you mean the spread of the virus, then yeah.

A ton of people came down to Florida which caused lots of people getting sick. The governor said anyone coming here from those states who have a high out break will be quarantined for 14 days. They may start charging people who comes to Florida with Covid-19 with attempted murder or reckless indifference. Reason? Because a large portion is over 65 and many people move here with medical problems that the weather helps.

If anyone denied my parents health care because they're to old or some such nonsense, I'd put a very large caliber hole in them. Some of you might think that's not much of a libertarian think to say. Libertarians believe in liberty and justice. We don't subscribe to anything other then that in our political and social viewpoint.

How you teach a child justice is, "You earn what you get." Me planting someone for letting my parents die needlessly is third degree murder. So death is the sentence for such a crime. Oh, I could let the courts deal with it and most likely be railroaded. You also might say, "But what about those that person could've saved?" My reply would be, "What about the people they kill by not giving aid?"

I'd plead guilty and go to the galos. I'm not a loser who'd run-n-hide.

Here's what spurred me to post this.

War and Plague: Who Should Be Treated?

PAUL ADAMS

Governments everywhere are moving to a level of control over industry and civilian life normally seen only in wartime. Iran and Israel agree on little else, but both see themselves as engaged in an all-out war against the virus.

The analogy to war is a common way to convey a sense of urgency, whether it be a war on waste or plastic straws, or poverty. In this case, however, there’s a wartime level of threat to life, a comparable interference in everyday lives, an expansion of state control over the economy, and, as British historian Robert Tombs puts it, “the need to create feelings of solidarity: the willingness to be public spirited and to bridle our natural egotism.”

Here I want to consider how the analogy to war, a “total war” that mobilizes the whole society, is being used or misused in conditions where health care systems are overwhelmed and forced to deny treatment to some who might benefit from it.

As in battle, not all the wounded can be saved, and choices have to be made.

On a Wartime Footing

Comparisons to World War II and the “spirit of the Blitz” are common in Britain. It was a time when, in the national memory, Londoners withstood daily bombing with courage, determination, solidarity, and patriotism, and came to each other’s aid.

Government control extended beyond providing health care for those serving in the greatly expanded armed services. It was also a matter of how the state needed to organize industry to meet critical health care needs, to apportion and ration health care resources, not least but not only for those wounded in combat.

Both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Donald Trump are putting industry on something like a wartime footing. “In an unprecedented peacetime call to arms,” the Telegraph reports, Johnson “is asking manufacturers ... to transform their current production lines to help produce ventilators as part of a ‘national effort’ to tackle the virus.”

In the United States, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950, first used during the Korean War, so he would be able to mobilize the private sector to manufacture goods needed in the fight against the pandemic.

The Dark Side of War Talk

For Irish writer John Waters, war talk is dangerous. From early on, as the disease engulfed northern Italy and swamped health care resources, physicians and policymakers spoke of the need to make hard choices in treating the sick, of “triaging in favor of younger, more ‘productive’ virus victims.”

It is the language of prudent policy analysis, of making inescapable choices, and the common good. But it sounds reasonable, Waters argues, only because it reflects and reinforces a wider throwaway culture criticized by John Paul II and subsequent popes, a culture of death in which the weak and vulnerable are increasingly excluded from the human community.

John Paul II argued 25 years ago that we are facing “a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater

acceptance, love and care is considered useless.”

The culture, in short, is desensitizing us “by ‘training’ us to see illness as a kind of luxury, treatment as a concession, and the old as a separate category of the human. Because the old are increasingly hidden away from everyday society in purpose-built nursing homes, when we happen upon the old we are already beginning to look away from their frailty, and therefore their, and our own, humanity,” writes Waters.

The language of combat triage to exclude from care and treatment whole categories of people misunderstands and misapplies the process. Military triage prioritizes for treatment those most likely to be capable of returning to the battlefield. It’s a dynamic process in which a soldier’s priority can change rapidly according to his health status.

Military triage follows well-established protocols. It doesn’t prioritize sick soldiers on the basis of age. But age-based triage is what appears to be happening in Italy—as Waters demonstrates from many Italian sources. An Israeli doctor practicing in Parma, Italy, confirms Waters’s account. He reports from the front lines that the age for exclusion from critical care with ventilators is as low as 60. Rationing Is Inevitable in Health Care

But are there not rational and just grounds for prioritizing measures like vaccination and testing of health care workers, who put themselves at higher risk and without whose work hospitals would collapse into centers of spreading infection?

Or for giving lower priority in the use of scarce equipment to those who are very frail and in rapidly declining health? Are these not indeed the kind of prudential choices that a plague, like a war, forces on our attention, however firm our commitment to doing no harm and to healing the sick?

Capacity for providing critical care beds with ventilators varies widely from country to country. No health care system can avoid the risk of being overwhelmed and unable to provide all the care they would if resources were unlimited. As in battle, not all the wounded can be saved, and choices have to be made. The current situation is not so different from combat triage as Waters suggests.

The important objection to Italy’s response is not that physicians had to choose whom to provide with the best available care. That is true in all health care systems. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that health care is an unquestioned right in the sense of an open-ended claim on the state.

Resources are limited, so the question remains, what better way might exist for allocating them? By treating age as the determining criterion, the Italian system laid itself open to the kind of criticism it has received. It excludes the most vulnerable, a whole category of the population, from the protection of the community.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has long experience of providing a universal health care system within a constraining budget. It has always had to ration health care, albeit through long waits rather than copays, deductibles, and caps. It regards rationing— denying a potentially beneficial treatment to a patient on the grounds of scarcity—as inescapable. But the UK, like Italy, has a universal health care system. The two countries provide an instructive contrast.

Resources are limited, so the question remains, what better way might exist for allocating them?

Faced with even fewer critical care beds, relative to population, the NHS has developed official guidance for physicians on how to decide whether patients suffering from the COVID-19 disease should be admitted to critical care or not. It has done so without mentioning age. The new NHS guidance is a dynamic triage system that relies on a Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) and “algorithm” or decision tree for choosing a treatment plan. It takes into account patient wishes, underlying pathologies, comorbidities, and severity of acute illness. All without mentioning age.

The UK’s triage approach isn’t immune from the cultural context that Waters describes, and doesn’t resolve other issues concerning the NHS and end-of-life care. But it is a more considered approach within a system that faces, just a week or two away, the kind of overwhelming strain on its resources that Italy has suffered. Paul Adams is a professor emeritus of social work at the University of Hawaii and was a professor and associate dean of academic affairs at Case Western Reserve University. He is the co-author of “Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is” and has written extensively on social welfare policy and professional and virtue ethics.


CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

Those who show up to be treated, and can be helped, should be helped. Some are not going to be able to be saved, and they should have resources to be made as comfortable as possible like hospices for others in their last days. But those who have a fighting chance at recovery, which is most right now, should be treated.

Who gets to decide who has the ability to survive? I know of many cases where someone said there's no hope. Then someone else helped and that person lived.

hello msharmony

.. I think the issue is with infection Transmission ... Most hospices do not have negative pressure isolation Rooms .

Curious .... if treatment was not an option .. how would you feel About giving a loved one end of life Comfort Cares in their home ???

What does a pandemic crisis mean to you ?? Do you feel there are adequate health resources to offer everyone treatment ??? If there is only one ventilator and 20 people needing mechanical ventilation .. how should it be decided who is ventilated???

Sure everyone has the right to treatment but if resources are unable to meet extreme demand globally how do you suggest that is rectified and in such a short timeframe ??? The disease has a rapid progression .

@space .. I heard making threats on social media to shoot someone .. are being taken very seriously ... that would include targeting healthcare workers .

Freedom of speech is being attacked all over the place. My comment is within the rights of the First Amendment. It's a hypothetical situation and is directed at no one in particular.

Although, the commie/fascists who are filled through America can throw me in jail. I don't care. It'll just prove that the human race is lost.

Apologies forgot to add this link msharmony .....

To help put things into perspective ..,
USA ventilator status

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12320581


Even if the reduced figure quoted of 300,000 needing mechanical ventilation is correct . The current supply quoted and anticipated manufactured supply fall below 300,000. There is already a considerable shortfall .. What then if 600,000 is a more accurate representation ???

I think you will find there has been considerable change in social media regulations . Good luck in explaining that it was only hypothetical .

Like I said, "commie/fascists." I know about the culture war. The progressives want to cansel people. During any overthrow of a government Libertarian types are the first to be put against the wall and shot to death. Reason being is because we're troublemakers.

In other words. We say stuff that makes people think about things. Even stuff that pisses people off.

The people who have the expertise in disease and illness maybe?

I feel at home comfort care is a reasonable option if nothing else will help, and at the patient's approval.

a crisis to me means lack of information and/or resources to contain something fatal and contagious

I know there is not adequate health resources, because a contingency for these types of numbers was most likely never even considered.

Only one person can be treated at a time. I feel resources should be used in the order of those patients admittance, to be totally fair.


I think the only thing that can be done is to contain the numbers as best we can until such time that it is understood enough to be treated and fatality rate decreased.

Not if that person's a nihilistic piece of trash. Which is what this is about.

People are brought up to be nihilists nowadays. Life has no value or meaning. This cuts to the quick for people like me. That's why I said what I did. Even if the only thing you can do is make a person as comfortable as possible and ease their pain, you do so.

thanks for your honesty .

Out of interest ...If your child needed That one ventilator would you still support the concept of first come first served ...regardless of any other influencing criteria .

I would, because I believe it is the only way to be 'fair' and understand that everyone is someone's child.

Y'all stop arguing and go wash ya hands so y'all don't get the cochina virus