Sometimes “House of God” gives you the answer. This falls under “They can always hurt you more”. The healthcare system is already broken and fucked. This will make it a little more broken and fucked. There’s plenty of room for it to get worse.
Right but I think the main difference is that, if Jha is right, we’re talking about the bulk of Americans being denied access to care during urgent needs. This is worse than getting care and getting fucked on costs, or having to wait a couple hours for something that’s not urgent because doctors are overbooked or ERs are full of uninsured patients with non-urgent needs.
This is more like, “We’re really sorry we don’t have anyone to help you with your heart attack right now, please wait until your name is called.”
I assume it’ll be slightly less obvious than that, perhaps patients in dire need of immediate care laying on gurneys in hallways? I dunno. Jha specifically said not being able to take care of heart attack or cancer patients.
I think Americans are used to getting fucked on costs and all the bullshit baked into our system, but not a lack of access to care in emergencies.
This idea that COVID is permanently ruining everyone’s immune system seems extremely farfetched.
I’m confused what you’re saying here really, because the reality is that people with heart attacks wait for care all the time (only an EKG is done right away looking for a very particular sort of heart attack), appendicitis surgeries aren’t really true emergencies (more urgent), I’ve been putting sick patients in the hallway since 2017… this is how the system works today.
The ER has been broken for decades. It’s the social safety net of the health care system, and we get fucked because of it.
Ruining and permanently are extremely strong words. Weakening for a lengthy period seems to be what’s being researched right now, with anything beyond that being just hypothesis/conjecture.
I don’t see how it’s farfetched at this point. I mean there are experts in the field saying it, we’ve seen other diseases get worse over the last few years. People can definitely argue over whether it’s likely or not, but it seems completely plausible to me at this point. I personally think it’s more likely than not.
Anthony Leonardi has been the loudest voice on the theory. He’s arrogant and obnoxious on Twitter, but he’s adamant that he’s being proven right. Here he’s citing the increased risk of Streptococal tonsillitis in kids 30-180 and 180-360 days after a COVID infection:
https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/1615386150528770053
That’s also a pretty good look at hazard ratios of a bunch of long covid symptoms by age group versus baseline.
I mean I don’t have the expertise or access to information that Jha has, but based on his statement I assume he means it’s going to be even worse now. Does that mean not doing the EKG right away? I don’t know.
Right, I think the general point is that the way we’ve handled COVID is going to continue to attack the weak points in our healthcare system, making things significantly worse.
The good news is appears COVID is protective against hair loss and abdominal pain!
Or people lose so much in the first 180 days that it’s impossible to lose more in the next 180 days!
Although more seriously I feel going to be super hard to account for human behavior when saying COVID increases risks for various stuff.
After we all got COVID we started going out to eat a bunch, taking kids to indoor events, etc. So my cholesterol probably went up and kid got more colds but that was because we weren’t hunkered in house
Wouldn’t the best method just be to compare to a 2019 baseline? Assuming that behavior after is similar to behavior before seems more or less reasonable.
Yeah I’m sure there are ways to do it. Just seems like the entire world screeching to a slower pace at once is a pretty crazy phenomena that going to make it hard to isolate some things
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“Substack, where the real news lives!”
Which is exactly what will happen.
Berenson is pre hyping some “paper” that’s guaranteed to both be bullshit and a big deal
This study claims the opposite of what prevailing wisdom & media have been telling us for the last three years:
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Per a adolescent psych doc I follow on Twitter, kids suicide is very much related to school attendance and this wasn’t controversial in their field
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Here’s a sum up of his claims and what looks like a nice rebuttal. Haven’t gone over this in detail though
https://twitter.com/enirenberg/status/1615916922712866816?s=46&t=sQpuG8n84hlEZDeu4jr_Gw
Get your bivalent peeps
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got it in september 
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met a girl last night that claims she has not regained smell or taste since she got covid over a year and a half ago - I get skeptical kinda of these stories but she showed me her weight loss pics that were a result of it - lost like 80 lbs - and I became convinced.
I think I’ve been fairly lucky, but like I said up thread I quarantined til the vaxx came out and have gotten every shot as soon as it was available so I don’t think I was ever exposed to it unvaccinated, if that makes a difference. I went to a super duper crowded club several nights ago and been testing negative. I think that was the riskiest thing I’ve done thus far.