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15 votes
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British Columbia embarks on bold experiment to decriminalize hard drugs - Possession of small amounts of fentanyl, heroin, cocaine and other hard drugs will be allowed in Canada’s westernmost province
10 votes -
US FDA moves to ease rules for blood donations from men who have sex with men
7 votes -
Nobody has my condition but me - Medical researchers find my genetic mutation endlessly fascinating. But being unique isn’t a plus when you’re a patient.
6 votes -
Government refuses to fund UK students at new medical school despite ‘chronic’ doctor shortage
6 votes -
‘You have to learn to listen’: How a doctor cares for Boston’s homeless
6 votes -
Critical incidents being declared across English hospitals
@Shaun Lintern: 🚨 @UHDBTrust declared a critical incident last night - cancelling all meetings and training to ensure clinical staff "are on wards and patient facing" pic.twitter.com/vLxUHwLZPD
14 votes -
Thousands of women in Greenland, including some as young as twelve, had a contraceptive device implanted in their womb, often without consent
16 votes -
Infectious disease applicants plummet, and US hospitals are scrambling
2 votes -
Denmark's long Covid patients feel abandoned by pandemic response
5 votes -
Florida Board of Medicine votes to ban gender affirming care for all trans teenagers
@Erin Reed: A dark day for trans youth.Florida Board of Medicine has just voted to ban gender affirming care for all trans teenagers.They cut the hearing early and told activists to "email them."I cry for Florida's trans youth. This was a sham hearing with fake experts. pic.twitter.com/JORaHN4uFA
18 votes -
Lawmakers in Finland have approved a legislative reform that will ease the process of getting an abortion in the country
5 votes -
Denmark is using Patient Reported Outcome questionnaires to improve medical care – can the patient's perception of the disease become part of the treatment?
4 votes -
US Federal law now requires distribution of complete healthcare records to patients in digital formats
11 votes -
Denmark and Greenland have formally agreed to launch a two-year investigation into historic birth control practices carried out for many years on Inuit Greenlanders
5 votes -
HPV self-sampling in Sweden leading to faster elimination of cervical cancer
4 votes -
Interrogating Gender-Exploratory Therapy (Perspectives on psychological science)
1 vote -
Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths gripping Britain is only tip of the iceberg
6 votes -
FDA clears path for hearing aids to be sold over the counter in the USA
18 votes -
Buy a rural hospital for $100? Investors pick up struggling institutions for pennies
7 votes -
‘Disturbing’: Experts troubled by Canada’s euthanasia laws
10 votes -
Did Sweden's controversial COVID strategy pay off? In many ways it did – but it let the elderly down
10 votes -
We can’t save the planet and make ExxonMobil happy
6 votes -
The mental health treatment obstacle course
7 votes -
Jon Stewart on PACT Act being blocked in the Senate
6 votes -
Doctors treating monkeypox complain of ‘daunting’ paperwork, obstacles
8 votes -
How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public
8 votes -
Joe Biden officials to keep private the names of US hospitals where patients contracted Covid
4 votes -
Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade; states can ban abortion
61 votes -
Judge blocks Texas investigating families of trans youth
18 votes -
How Ben got his penis
15 votes -
A day in the life of a music festival medic
5 votes -
Banning abortions will not stop abortions
9 votes -
A dangerous place to be Latino
3 votes -
Canada eliminates mandatory waiting period for gay men to donate blood
17 votes -
Canada will soon offer doctor-assisted death to the mentally ill. Who should be eligible?
11 votes -
Hospital refusing heart transplant for man who won't get vaccinated
28 votes -
The unvaccinated NHS workers facing the sack in the UK
11 votes -
Do Ask, Tell, and Show: Contextual Factors Affecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Disclosure for Sexual and Gender Minority People
10 votes -
Fighters and Failure: Medical words that hurt
2 votes -
What to know about the battle over Fox Valley health care workers now playing out in court
12 votes -
Always remember - The Therac 25 incident
17 votes -
Kidney failure, emergency rooms and medical debt: The unseen costs of food poisoning
3 votes -
Belgium wants to make it easier for gay men to donate blood
10 votes -
Do you feel like many systems are on the verge of collapse?
My post will be US-centric, because that's where I live, but obviously you're welcome to talk about your own location as well. With this new COVID-19/Omicron surge, strange things are afoot....
My post will be US-centric, because that's where I live, but obviously you're welcome to talk about your own location as well.
With this new COVID-19/Omicron surge, strange things are afoot. Specifically, those in charge of our systems and government have chose to ignore it, rather than institute more shut downs, mandates, stimuli, etc. It appears as though the plan now is to let it burn through the population and see how that shakes out.
But if you peruse r/nursing and r/teachers like I do, you can really see how deep the cracks are becoming. Infections are up, as are hospitalizations, and with more and more professionals out sick, we're seeing huge staff shortages in both education and health care. These industries in particular are essential, and the professionals in these jobs are on the front line of our problems. Health care professionals obviously need to be there to help the sick. And teachers need to be there not only to teach, but so that parents can go to work. They're being sacrificed to our economy.
But as teachers, for example, get sick or get burned out and quit, it puts continued strain on the education system as a whole. We're already seeing staff shortages in other areas of education, such as food service, bus drivers, substitutes, paraprofessionals. With how contagious this variant is, it's only a matter of time until school systems collapse in on themselves due to a lack of people running the show. And when kids have no place to go, parents will have to figure something out or stay home themselves, pulling them away from their jobs and their income.
With all help being pulled away from Americans--help such as eviction moratoriums, financial stimulus, unemployment benefits--what might happen if these things begin to cascade? There are already plenty of anecdotal reports from those in health care that hospitals are full, short staffed, and falling (and you can check here to see hospital status in your state). It can take hours, if not days, to find a bed for someone in the ER. As for education, increasingly both teachers and students are out sick with COVID, yet administrations are fighting tooth and nail against any kind of remote learning, only exacerbating the problem. Remote learning, as you know, requires a parent to be home with the child, which takes them away from work, income, and economic productivity.
And meanwhile, the media seems mostly quiet about how things are actually going. The line is that Omicron is "mild" but if you look at hospitals and schools, it seems like that might just be verbiage to reduce panic in the populace. Omicron isn't mild for the health care system. Better hope you don't get in a car accident. And in medical terms, "mild" is a pretty broad thing. It could mean you're home sick for two weeks, feeling like death, but not bad enough to be hospitalized.
And then there are other front line workers, grocery stores, supply chain, all experiencing similar sickness and staff shortages. But I haven't been keeping up with that as much lately as I have been with education and health care. If anybody has information about these sectors, I'd love to hear it.
My gut feeling is that the economy is actually on the verge of collapse, and this "let it rip!" strategy is a hail mary to see if the status quo can be maintained by sacrificing the health and well-being of a lot of people. Any other mitigation efforts could topple the economy as we know it (and as those at the top benefit from it), so the people in charge of our systems have decided that we're not going to try to fix things, we're just going to hope it works out in the end and deal with the death and illness. For me, the proverbial canary in the coal mine for this was the recent extension of the student loan payment pause. Borrowers had been blasted for months, both phone calls and emails, telling them that loans would need to be paid after January 31st, it was happening, get ready for it. And then poof... nope. Extended. The government knows. People are stretched thin as it is and restarting loan payments could be the thing that triggers the economy to tumble. Even if borrowers can pay, it sucks money out of the consumer economy which can have far-reaching effects.
Many, if not most people are absolutely fatigued by this pandemic. I am, you probably are. But it has revealed so many cracks in our flawed system and it really feels like the people in charge of things--whoever that is--are gripping on for dear life, just hoping the flaws can remain because it benefits them, praying that the system holds. I just don't see it. I don't see how we make it through this without some kind of major fall. People want to ignore it all, because it's frightening and it's negative, but it's happening right in front of our eyes. Our most important systems are broken and those with the power to fix them aren't doing it.
I'm curious as to what Tildes thinks.
31 votes -
California’s overflowing coffers hand Newsom ‘every politician’s dream’
8 votes -
Red Cross declares first-ever national blood crisis
8 votes -
Real-time alerting system for COVID-19 and other stress events using wearable data
6 votes -
Why US healthcare workers are quitting in droves: About one in five have left medicine since the pandemic started
12 votes -
California hospitals brace for ‘Striketober’ amid COVID staffing shortages
5 votes