Gov DeWine deploys National Guard to hospitals as COVID deaths surpass 2020

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2021/12/17/gov-dewine-deploys-national-guard-to-hospitals-as-covid-deaths-surpass-2020/

by Geekette • 5 years ago

38 98 5 years ago

Quequau2• 5 years ago

This is region locked. Why do the Americans need soldiers in hospitals? Are these some kind of special medical unit or something?

ev1• 5 years ago

insufficient staff, too many patients

commoner• 5 years ago

Here's a copy of the article from archive.today: https://archive.md/PhD5l

Quequau2• 5 years ago

Thanks!

tzs2• 5 years ago

FTA:> “Earlier in the pandemic, our concern in our hospitals was about beds, was about space, today is about personnel,” DeWine said. “22 months. 22 months of this pandemic has taken its toll on our health care workers, and that is certainly, certainly understandable.”

Of the 1,050 national guard troops being deployed, about 150 are medically trained personnel who can assist in helping patients. DeWine insisted that he and Adjutant General John Harris have worked together to ensure the deployment won’t mean pulling people away from a hospital day job to go work at a different hospital. The remaining 900 troops will be tasked with support services.
“They will do many things to help the hospitals in this time of great, great crisis,” DeWine said. “It will involve transport within the hospital, food and the environmental work that goes on in hospitals and is so very important every single day.”

hagbard_c• 5 years ago

This is not unique to the USA, e.g. in the Netherlands the army assists in testing and vaccination campaigns [1]. This is just common sense, those organisations have a large number of people (who in peacetime have not much more to do than exercise and maintain their equipment) who are trained to act in a short times notice and can deploy facilities which are not available to civil authorities.

https://www.defensie.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-covid-19

lotsofpulp10• 5 years ago

The organizations that employ healthcare workers, and indirectly the organizations that pay for healthcare, do not want to pay sufficient wages to incentivize people to work in the roles needed to provide the level of healthcare expected by the population.

Instead of fixing the remuneration so that people are incentivized to work in healthcare, the easier solution for leaders is to “draft” who chose to be eligible to be drafted in emergencies and have them work. In reality, this is simply displacing healthcare workers from elsewhere.

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/rhbri5/comment/ho...

It is leaders of today destroying trust in emergency organizations, protocols, and structure to avoid paying higher wages. Why would anyone sign up for national guard when your role includes having to work because of insufficient wages causing lack of supply of labor?

nojito4• 5 years ago

This really doesn’t have anything to do with wages. Healthcare staff just don’t exist in the quantities we need right now.

It’s a worst case scenario with a bunch declaring early retirement, even more changing professions due to COVID trauma, and lack of proper pipelines of staff.

least• 5 years ago

The article says that about 150 of the 1050 troops deployed are medically trained. Most will be providing support services where needed.

The national guard exists to answer the call of the state governor for all sorts of things. You’ll also see them deployed for state emergencies like a hurricane or tornado.

Think of it as a quick to mobilize population of volunteers that are trained to do various things.

simonbarker87• 5 years ago

Yes this is one of the main benefits of having military type orgs available even if not in conflict - you have a group of proven competent people, trained to execute orders that you can deploy into a variety if situations where people power is useful/important. The British Army were used for the 2012 Olympic as marshals etc as G4S messed up the preparations.

3232• 5 years ago

Not everything in a hospital requires medical training. Some stuff is purely logistical.

logosmonkey2• 5 years ago

Because our hospitals are over capacity - specifically well over 100% nurse to patient capacity - the guard members will likely be helping with all of the non-medical work nurses would normally do in non pandemic times. Stuff like cleanup, re-supply of rooms and supply closets, maybe some check in work that sort of thing.

crisdux3• 5 years ago

This is caused by staffing shortages. Our hospitals thought it was a good idea to fire nurses and staff over the summer.

andrekandre• 5 years ago

why did they get fired?

otabdeveloper4• 5 years ago

It's a secret we will never know the answer to. Maybe historians from the far future will find some clues.

mberning• 5 years ago

Some got fired. Some quit and found different, better paying jobs. The reality is that being on staff, working at the bedside in a hospital is a hard job with mediocre pay. But hospitals will give docs huge bonuses and pay travel nurses 2-3x what they pay nurses already on payroll. My wife was an RN at a major pediatric hospital and took a job at a private practice. Much easier job, closer to home, better pay. The hospital called her a month after she left and offered a 5k rehire bonus. Thank you, but no.

crisdux3• 5 years ago

They would not take the covid vaccine. These vaccine mandates have consequences.

unpolloloco4• 5 years ago

Probably because procedure volume was down, so they canned people who they could. And then got caught off guard when demand increased again suddenly. Same thing happens over and over in manufacturing.

hownottowrite4• 5 years ago

I have a friend in southern Ohio who is an ICU doc. They’ve been dealing with +140% occupancy for the last few weeks. Staff shortages in their hospital are due to people leaving the field entirely (either worn out, tired of patient abuse, or actually dead). Vaccine mandates had almost zero impact.

crowbahr3• 5 years ago

95% of Ohio deaths were the unvaccinated.

Vaccine mandates clearly helped.

9 of 10 patients in Ohio hospitals are unvaccinated.

The issue with vaccine mandates is they weren't strict enough.

adnmcq9992• 5 years ago

I think what they mean is nobody got vaxxed

cko• 5 years ago

Your antiscientific rhetoric is bullshit.

I didn't read it that way.

The issue with vaccine mandates is they weren't strict enough.

That was how I interpreted GP's statement.

ndespres• 5 years ago

I think that they are commenting specifically on the reasons for the staff shortage, in response to the popular claim that people are quitting their jobs over the vaccine mandates.

bsaul• 5 years ago

is this 9 out 10 stat real ? Where i live, govt has tried to spread those numbers, but they were actually incorrect: That 9 out of 10 number they talked about was actually the chance of ending in hospital if infected depending on vax or not ( aka : you're 9 times more likely to end up in hospital if you're not vaxed)

But hospitals were actually in majority filled with vaxed people.

hownottowrite4• 5 years ago

To be clear, the vaccine mandates for healthcare staff had little to no impact on actual care. Very few professionals were unvaxxed and even fewer left/were dismissed as a result of not vaxxing (i.e. they got vaxxed). The staffing is low because providers are leaving or have left the field due to horrid conditions. However, the real issue here is that the bed count didn’t go down just because there was no one to cover… Hospitals in many places are simply being inundated with patients (mostly unvaxxed).

xwdv2• 5 years ago

Why on Earth are people still not getting vaccinated?

ctyc4• 5 years ago

Because some people have already had COVID, received natural antibodies as a result, and are relying on time-tested science, logic, and intuition in their personal decision to not also get a set of shots + [x] boosters so they can be “safe”. By the way, do me a favor and solve for x in the above equation! And solve again a year from now. And again 5 years from now.

_Microft2• 5 years ago

Influenza, tetanus, TBE and polio vaccinations also require repeat shots from time to time - and there are certainly more as these are only the ones that I can remember off the cuff.

BobbyJo3• 5 years ago

I completely agree that having been infected with COVID should excuse one from vaccine mandates, at least within some time frame. However, that isn't why most of the unvaccinated are unvaccinated. Only a few million people had been infected with COVID in the U.S. at the time the vaccine was released, around 1% of the population.

mcculley2• 5 years ago

Of the many people who have told me that they have had COVID already, none have donated blood and received a free antibody test. I donated blood three times between the start of the pandemic and getting the first vaccine. I got three free antibody tests.

Most of the unvaccinated that I talk to who claim to have had COVID but won't give blood say they are scared of needles. So it makes sense they are scared of getting the vaccine.

bm3719• 5 years ago

Wikipedia defines a vaccine as "a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease."

It's not currently possible to be vaccinated, and calling our current treatment a "vaccine" is incorrect.

namdnay2• 5 years ago

I don’t understand your point. It’s a vaccine, you get vaccinated, your body produces antibodies, your risk of catching the disease goes down, your risk of ending up in hospital nearly disappears

dotancohen• 5 years ago

From the fine article:

  > The nearly 14,000 Ohioans who have died this year were
  > almost exclusively — about 95% — unvaccinated individuals.

ghastmaster• 5 years ago

The key here is the words "this year". Most of the deaths this year occurred earlier in the year when vaccination was not available. I've tried finding the data on the state and CDC website a couple of times throughout the year to no avail. I would like to see the trend right now or at least the past couple months data.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.md/PhD5l

adnmcq9992• 5 years ago

If only being a nurse paid as much as attending virtual scrum meetings

unpolloloco4• 5 years ago

It does if you're willing to be a travel nurse and work on covid floors. I've been hearing $6000/week numbers being thrown around (and some nurses are picking up two contracts at a time!). It's insanely shitty work right now (surrounded by people dying left and right and understaffed on top of that, but the pay is good...).

lotsofpulp10• 5 years ago

Have to incorporate a premium for the travel nurse job being not in your home office, income being more volatile than a salaried job, and travel nurses are independent contractors so they have to pay for housing/health insurance/taxes.

The $6k per week easily comes down to $3k per week or less of comparable W-2 income, which you can come close to or surpass doing virtual scrum meetings with none of the income volatility of nursing nor the messiness or risk of being infected or attacked. And not seeing your family/friends after work.

MobileVet2• 5 years ago

Beyond Covid, this is a very scary situation that will only get worse as the numbers continue to climb in the region. You do NOT want to need medical care of any kind right now in NE Ohio.

We just canceled our trip to see family in Cleveland as a result. My youngest has a bad cold (PCR negative) but if that were to get passed to my elderly parents or asthmatic nephews, things could escalate quickly.

It almost doesn’t matter how severe Omicron cases are if the net result is hospital overload.

https://www.cleveland19.com/2021/12/17/cleveland-clinic-post...

Considering that these hospitals are already full, this will get worse before it gets better.

tomjen33• 5 years ago

It has been two years at this point, it is a shame on those in charge that the hospitals aren't up to handling the issue now.

I wish it was a criminal matter, but unfortunately it isn't the case.

MobileVet2• 5 years ago

Clearly fault lies in many areas but how could admins avoid this?

Their staff is exhausted and quitting far beyond normal attrition levels. The public continues to get sick and now another surge is upon them.

What knob do you turn that they haven’t?

jleyank3• 5 years ago

I would appreciate any help in squaring things like this story with seeing 50k plus in (indoor) sports events with no masking or other remediation measures. And they’re in the same or adjacent states. Is it merely that they’re tolerating the deaths and sickness as less important that their inconvenience?

ssharp4• 5 years ago

Because 65% of Ohio's adult population has chosen to receive vaccines and want to live normal lives because of it?

jleyank3• 5 years ago

So they think that covid is over for them so they can go on? What about the unvaxed amongst them?

mcculley2• 5 years ago

I am a little skeptical about the claims in the article that Ohio COVID deaths are higher in 2021 than in 2020. I have been building tooling around the CDC excess deaths reports [0]. Ohio looks like it did not have the same peaks in 2021 as it did in 2020 [1]. There would have to be 11,778 more deaths recorded at this point to catch up to 2020.

Certainly the situation is unacceptable and terrible. But I am not convinced that it is much worse in 2021 than in 2020.

[0] https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/

[1] https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/Ohio.pn...

[2]: Ohio deaths:

2018: 124,296

2019: 123,359

2020: 142,210

2021: 130,432

disambiguation• 5 years ago

I came across an amazing resource the other day that provides data driven insights specifically to Ohio's covid situation, and I'm surprised not to see it in this article.

https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/dashboa...

This site provides stats that breakdown hospitalizations by age and race and also reports inpatient and ICU capacity.

It seems right now hospitals are at about 80% capacity, and out of total capacity 20% is due to covid cases.

Gov DeWine deploys National Guard to hospitals as COVID deaths surpass 2020

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