You are right. We were talking about a******n. I think we are both smart enough to get that the problem has finite and undesirable outcomes, no matter how one cuts the cake.

I don't WANT anyone to have any a******n. I hope someday we have all of the resources that we will be able to live in a kinder, slower, more supportive world. Right now, we do not live in that world. And since we don't have a perfect world, we are left with some barbaric practices.

In my perfect world, private prisons and detention centers don't exist. The death penalty is abolished. All children get a good liberal arts education in their own communities, which are racially balanced. We give everyone a guaranteed universal income, and single payer health care. Everyone eats from local, urban farms that are subsidized by local, municipal, state, and federal government. We grow sustainable plants, on our rooftops, to help slow c*****e c****e and generate oxygen for the urban areas that were designed in the 1920's vision of upscale and modernity. People like Jeff Bezos' tax cut buried inside C****-** relief funds got such a BIG break that it made Bezos in the $300,000,000,000 range. NO one needs 300 billion in a p******c. He, Bill Gates, George Soros, the Clintons, Karl Rove, Betsy De Vos doesn't need 10+, multi-million, 100 foot long yachts.

The right keeps screaming about lefties living with undocumented immigrants. That's an awesome idea! Maybe then we all only need to work one job instead of three!!! And, you agree to take ALL of the post-birth-canal babies, regardless of medical and physical conditions. Let's see how pro-life you are then.

The answer is already clear: He will embrace pseudo-science to justify nationwide mandates for lockdowns, mask wearing and social distancing. More people will die as a result these policies than from C****-**, but those lives are not worth protecting. Patrick Wood

Will Biden Listen To The Science Or The Pseudo-Science?
Ron Paul ~ November 17, 2020
Former Vice President Joe Biden has not been officially declared the winner of the 2020 p**********l e******n, but that has not stopped him from forming a c****av***s task force. The task force is composed of supporters of increased government control.

One idea Biden and his task force are considering is a four to six weeks nationwide lockdown. However, supporting a nationwide lockdown would violate Biden’s campaign pledge to “listen to the science.” The evidence regarding lockdowns is so overwhelming that even the World Health Organization (WHO) has been forced to admit the t***h: lockdowns do more harm than good.

Lockdowns result in more instances of depression, suicide, domestic violence, and alcohol and drug abuse. Lockdowns also cause people to not go to hospitals or doctors’ offices, leading to people dying because they failed to obtain medical assistance in a timely manner.

Biden also is working with governors, mayors, and other state and local officials to create a de facto national mask mandate. Biden has also declared he will mandate mask wearing in all federal buildings and for people traveling interstate. A mask mandate for interstate travel could mean you will be required to wear a mask on airplanes, trains, and even when driving in your own car if you cross state lines.

Yet again, Biden is ignoring the science. In this case the science has demonstrated that most masks are ineffective at preventing the spread of a v***s. Medical science also shows that wearing a mask for extended periods of time can cause health problems. For example, mask wearing interferes with proper breathing. Long-term mask wearing may also cause serious dental problems. Ironically, major victims of mask mandates include low-wage workers Biden and his fellow progressives claim to care so much about. Many of these workers are required to wear masks on the job.

Biden has also proposed raising an army of “culturally competent” contact tracers. According to the University of California, San Francisco, which is helping train that California’s contact tracers, contract tracers “…ask questions related to topics that can be sensitive, including health, work, living arrangements and food resources” in order to identify someone who should be quarantined. These contract tracers could also be able to enforce masks or other mandates — including a potential v*****e mandate — by helping ensure that those who refuse to comply are indefinitely quarantined.

Biden is not the only politician pushing authoritarian “solutions” to c****av***s. The government of Washington, DC is considering authorizing v******ting of children without parental consent. This ignores the science that some people will have a negative reaction even to a generally safe v*****e, so individuals should make their own decision in consultation with their physician. This is especially important these days, as we are dealing with a v*****e that is being rushed into production for political reasons and that even the manufactures admit will have serious side effects.

Lockdowns, masks, and other authoritarian measures do little or nothing to promote health. Instead, they erode freedom and create their own health problems. Those who know the t***h must make Joe Biden and other authoritarians listen to the true science. While those more at risk — such as the elderly and people with certain health problems — could be encouraged to take extra precautions, all Americans should be given back the liberty to make their own healthcare decisions.

How about stopping the insanity and lies. C***d sucks and is getting worse and we can do something about it but you and others here don't want to. So we are in for some tough times between now and when a v*****e becomes widely available. It does not need to be this way. Masks sure as hell work. If we end up with more shutdowns it's the fault of people who still do not take this seriously.

Perhaps no hospital in the United States was better prepared for a p******c than the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. The people on staff had detailed p******c plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Barack Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases. There’s a reason many of the Americans who were airlifted from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February were sent to UNMC.

In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a C****-** tower, from the top down. It now has 10 C****-** units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to C****-** patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s C****-** team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”

To hear such talk from someone at UNMC, the best-prepared of America’s hospitals, should shake the entire nation. In mid-March, when just 18 Nebraskans had tested positive for C****-**, Shelly Schwedhelm, the head of the hospital’s emergency-preparedness program, sounded gently confident. Or, at least, she told me: “I’m confident in having a plan.” She hoped the hospital wouldn’t hit capacity, “because people will have done the right thing by staying home,” she said. And people did: For a while, the U.S. flattened the curve.

But now about 2,400 Nebraskans are testing positive for C****-** every day—a rate five times higher than in the spring. More than 20 percent of tests are coming back positive, and up to 70 percent in some rural counties—signs that many infections aren’t being detected. The number of people who’ve been hospitalized with the disease has tripled in just six weeks. UNMC is fuller with C****-** patients—and patients, full stop—than it has ever been. “We’re watching a system breaking in front of us and we’re helpless to stop it,” says Kelly Cawcutt, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician.

Cawcutt knows what’s coming. Throughout the p******c, hospitalizations have lagged behind cases by about 12 days. Over the past 12 days, the total number of confirmed cases in Nebraska has risen from 82,400 to 109,280. That rise represents a wave of patients that will slam into already beleaguered hospitals between now and Thanksgiving. “I don’t see how we avoid becoming overwhelmed,” says Dan Johnson, a critical-care doctor. People need to know that “the assumption we will always have a hospital bed for them is a false one.”

What makes this “nightmare” worse, he adds, “is that it was preventable.” The c****av***s is not unstoppable, as some have suggested and as New Zealand, Iceland, Australia, and Hong Kong have resoundingly disproved—twice. Instead, the Trump administration never mounted a serious effort to stop it. Whether through gross incompetence or deliberate strategy, the president and his advisers left the v***s to run amok, allowed Americans to get sick, and punted the consequences to the health-care system. And they did so repeatedly, even after the ordeal of the spring, after the playbook for controlling the v***s became clear, and despite months of warnings about a fall surge.

Not even the best-prepared hospital can compensate for an unchecked p******c. UNMC’s pr********ns didn’t fail so much as the U.S. created a situation in which hospitals could not possibly succeed. “We can prepare over and over for a wave of patients,” says Cawcutt, “but we can’t prepare for a tsunami.”

A full hospital means that everyone waits. C****-** patients who are going downhill must wait to enter a packed intensive-care unit. Patients who cannot breathe must wait for the many minutes it takes for a nurse elsewhere in the hospital to remove cumbersome protective gear, run over, and don the gear again. On Tuesday, one rapidly deteriorating patient needed to be intubated, but the assembled doctors had to wait, because the anesthesiologists were all busy intubating four other patients in an ICU and a few more in an emergency room.

None of the people I spoke with would predict when UNMC will finally hit its capacity ceiling, partly because they’re doing everything to avoid that scenario, and partly because it’s so grim as to be almost unthinkable. But “we’re rapidly approaching that point,” Hewlett said.

When it arrives, people with C****-** will die not just because of the v***s, but because the hospital will have nowhere to put them and no one to help them. Doctors will have to decide who to put on a ventilator or a dialysis machine. They’ll have to choose whether to abandon entire groups of patients who can’t get help elsewhere. While cities like New York and Boston have many big hospitals that can care for advanced strokes, failing hearts that need mechanical support, and t***splanted organs, “in this region, we’re it,” Johnson says. “We provide care that can’t be provided at any other hospital for a 200-mile radius. We’re going to need to decide if we continue to offer that care, or if we admit every single C****-** patient who comes through our door.”

During the spring, most of UNMC’s C****-** patients were either elderly people from nursing homes or workers in meatpacking plants and factories. But with the third national surge, “all the trends have gone out the window,” Sarah Swistak, a staff nurse, told me. “From the 90-year-old with every comorbidity listed to the 30-year-old who is the picture of perfect health, they’re all requiring oxygen because they’re so short of breath.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/americas-best-prepared-hospital-nearly-overwhelmed/617156/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

You are right. We were talking about a******n. I think we are both smart enough to get that the problem has finite and undesirable outcomes, no matter how one cuts the cake.

I don't WANT anyone to have any a******n. I hope someday we have all of the resources that we will be able to live in a kinder, slower, more supportive world. Right now, we do not live in that world. And since we don't have a perfect world, we are left with some barbaric practices.

In my perfect world, private prisons and detention centers don't exist. The death penalty is abolished. All children get a good liberal arts education in their own communities, which are racially balanced. We give everyone a guaranteed universal income, and single payer health care. Everyone eats from local, urban farms that are subsidized by local, municipal, state, and federal government. We grow sustainable plants, on our rooftops, to help slow c*****e c****e and generate oxygen for the urban areas that were designed in the 1920's vision of upscale and modernity. People like Jeff Bezos' tax cut buried inside C****-** relief funds got such a BIG break that it made Bezos in the $300,000,000,000 range. NO one needs 300 billion in a p******c. He, Bill Gates, George Soros, the Clintons, Karl Rove, Betsy De Vos doesn't need 10+, multi-million, 100 foot long yachts.

The right keeps screaming about lefties living with undocumented immigrants. That's an awesome idea! Maybe then we all only need to work one job instead of three!!! And, you agree to take ALL of the post-birth-canal babies, regardless of medical and physical conditions. Let's see how pro-life you are then.