Our "great testing" is completely stupid

[Den60]

This is a foolish notion that places like Breitbart and Gateway like to peddle to people who don't like to thik things all the way thorugh.

Where would you send those sick patients if not back to their SNF? SNF = skilled nursing facility. Yo know, where they have nurses, equipment, rooms, training for dealing with infectious disease. What would you have them do instead? Send them home to their families so they can spread it even faster and to more people? Send them to hospitals, so they can be even more overwhelmed?

The SNFs were and still are the best place for sick residents to go back to once they are no longer in acute danger. Where do you think 80 year old grandmas go after they are stabilized at the hospitals right now? Yep, they go right back to SNFs, because that is the best place for them.

Of course, you'll say, "But that's how we got so many deaths!" That is because the disease is a very difficult one, no doubt about it. Compound that with a dire lack of PPE even now because the government can't get it together, plus a CDC that's been sidelined and cut out of the public view, and a leadership that keeps insisting that "it's going to dissappear" - well, this is what you get.

Anyone who thinks that employees, including nurses, at SNFs are on par with those found in hospitals is either an idiot or has never been in one of those places. I'm guessing you have been in one.

Here is a bit on that subject:

4. ROUTINE AND PRE‐OUTBREAK PREVENTION MEASURES
4.1. Planning, training and education
LTCFs have a broad staff base and may include people with little or no formal healthcare training. Depending upon the type of facility and the nursing needs of the residents, services are provided by a range of staff including care assistants with few formal healthcare qualifications, registered nurses, domestic staff, catering and administrative staff, with additional ambulatory health services usually provided by external contractors such as general practitioners (GPs) and other healthcare professionals not directly affiliated to the facility.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5596516/

Do a search for something like "nursing home hygiene" or something and see what you get. You have to wade through a lot of ads from legal firms but you can find plenty on the subject.

[SanDiego619]

Nope, still not scared.

Take the masks off and enjoy life!

[duenor]

The president spoke calmly and reassuringly to the public while doing unprecedented things to protect the American public.

We had 3 months before it hit us and we did nothing except a travel ban that only blocked Chinese nationals. It's been 8 months and we still can't buy N95s in the stores. Every day a thousand people die while in Germany, Italy, and Norway they have 1, 1, and 0. The entire federal top leadership is screwing this whole crisis up horribly, is continuing to screw it up. We are the most developed country in the world, we've spent the most money, and yet we are handling it the worst. Gun rights are deeply important to me, but just because someone is pro gun doesn't mean I will give them a pass on screwing up royally like this. 5.5 million of our countrymen and women are sick. 166,000 are dead. And don't tell me it's fine because most of them were going to die anyway.

We are pouring our money down the drain, getting little for it, and the administration's supporters are still blindly believing the lies and supporting poor administration. Our testing turnaround time is NOT acceptable if even Trumps own testing chief Giroir says that most people don't get it within 48 hours. It's funny people believe that withholding payment for slow tests won't work, but at the same time they believe that withholding the covid19 reimbursement bonus - a laughably small amount for anyone who knows what hospital bills are like - would immediately reduce our case numbers.

whatever. believe what you want, believe it's all about the election. our country will remain mired in coronavirus because our leadership and a large segment of our population remains convinced that the election is more important than handling this pandemic properly.

[SanDiego619]

We had 3 months before it hit us and we did nothing except a travel ban that only blocked Chinese nationals. It's been 8 months and we still can't buy N95s in the stores. Every day a thousand people die while in Germany, Italy, and Norway they have 1, 1, and 0. The entire federal top leadership is screwing this whole crisis up horribly, is continuing to screw it up. We are the most developed country in the world, we've spent the most money, and yet we are handling it the worst.

Gun rights are deeply important to me, but just because someone is pro gun doesn't mean I will give them a pass on screwing up royally like this. 5.5 million of our countrymen and women are sick. 166,000 are dead. And don't tell me it's fine because most of them were going to die anyway.

We are pouring our money down the drain, getting little for it, and the administration's supporters are still blindly believing the lies and supporting poor administration. Our testing turnaround time is NOT acceptable if even Trumps own testing chief Giroir says that most people don't get it within 48 hours.

It's funny people believe that withholding payment for slow tests won't work, but at the same time they believe that withholding the covid19 reimbursement bonus - a laughably small amount for anyone who knows what hospital bills are like - would immediately reduce our case numbers.

whatever. believe what you want, believe it's all about the election. our country will remain mired in coronavirus because our leadership and a large segment of our population remains convinced that the election is more important than handling this pandemic properly.

We don't need N95 masks or testing. No reason for it. We don't do all this for the flu, why are we doing it for this virus?

Oh wait, I know why.

[duenor]

Anyone who thinks that employees, including nurses, at SNFs are on par with those found in hospitals is either an idiot or has never been in one of those places. I'm guessing you have been in one.

I've been in many. SNFs and LTCFs are not hospitals, but they are far better suited to taken care of sick people than sending grandma or grandpa home to suddenly live family members who are not prepared in any shape or form. Where do you think sick elderly people go now, once they are no longer in acute danger?

I'm guessing you didn't really read much of the article you linked to, either. "may include people with little or no formal healthcare training" does not mean everybody in the LTCF has no training. It means some of them might not - like the orderlies who fold the linens or the cleaning crew who mops the floors. That article you linked to describes how a LTCF should be managed, not proves that LTCFs aren't capable of handling infectious diseases. Not to mention that SNF is not the same as LTCF.

I picked the first Los Angeles SNF at random and here is what they offer: http://www.gardencrestweb.com/nursing-care.html
Garden Crest Rehabilitation Center Provides Specialized Service To Optimize Recovery. This is typical of an SNF.
• Physical Therapy
• Occupational Therapy
• Speech Therapy
• Wound Care
• Respiratory Therapy
• IV Therapy – Incl. TPN & Lipids Wound Care
• Enteral Feeding
• Pain Management

[duenor]

We don't need N95 masks or testing. No reason for it. We don't do all this for the flu, why are we doing it for this virus?

Oh wait, I know why.

Because the flu is not sars-cov2. all right, guess you are solidly convinced about this. I'm sure this belief will age well when Trump wins and we are still stuck in covid19 land come january. I'm sure there will be another round of blaming China and democrats and immigrants.

[M76]

You know I root for a football team with a good QB, but the team sucks. I see people like you, so called fans, that rag on the QB because they don't win yet he puts up winning numbers.

The analysis is the same; you rag on the president over what he can't control. He is in a no win situation one exasperated by his political opponents and either you hate him too or just buy into that. Those same opponents preached he should follow the science (Fauci) but he didn't - he did MORE then Fauci said was necessary and where is his credit for that - not in your head obviously.

The science hates Trump, the media hates Trump, and they are not immune to using this crisis to propel their hatred of Trump; so either you are espousing exactly what they want you too as a tool of theirs or you just hate him and are looking for anything you can to knock on him for. Where is your credit to the good he's done in this crisis?

/thread

[bagman]

[Den60]

I've been in many. SNFs and LTCFs are not hospitals, but they are far better suited to taken care of sick people than sending grandma or grandpa home to suddenly live family members who are not prepared in any shape or form. Where do you think sick elderly people go now, once they are no longer in acute danger?

I'm guessing you didn't really read much of the article you linked to, either. "may include people with little or no formal healthcare training" does not mean everybody in the LTCF has no training. It means some of them might not - like the orderlies who fold the linens or the cleaning crew who mops the floors. That article you linked to describes how a LTCF should be managed, not proves that LTCFs aren't capable of handling infectious diseases. Not to mention that SNF is not the same as LTCF.

I picked the first Los Angeles SNF at random and here is what they offer: http://www.gardencrestweb.com/nursing-care.html
Garden Crest Rehabilitation Center Provides Specialized Service To Optimize Recovery. This is typical of an SNF.
• Physical Therapy
• Occupational Therapy
• Speech Therapy
• Wound Care
• Respiratory Therapy
• IV Therapy – Incl. TPN & Lipids Wound Care
• Enteral Feeding
• Pain Management

Yes, I read through much of it, just quoted the part where it speaks to the "skilled" part you referenced. I have been in a few as well, and hospitals and I can say the level of care and hygiene between the two is not comparable. You can go back and search Google to find articles about how deadly just the flu can be in nursing homes. When it comes to the spread of a contagious disease you are only as strong as your weakest link. This disease pretty much kills those who would have trouble surviving a case of the flu. Sure, if Grandma or Grandpa has serious health issues they might be better suited in a SNCF but they are at much higher risk of dying from the flu, another SARS type event, or COVID in that type of facility than being at home. Even the PA Health Secretary pulled its mom out of a nursing home in response to the policies she and the governor implemented. There is a reason why Cuomo won't allow an independent investigation on his policies in NY, and he had thousands of beds available that the feds built for him that went unused.

Since you posted a Nursing Home brochure piece I feel free to post this in contrast:

SEATTLE (CN) – The daughter of a Covid-19 victim has sued the owners and operators of a Seattle-area nursing home where her mother lived, claiming they failed to quarantine residents and staff, admitted new residents and allowed a Mardi Gras party at the facility despite being on alert for the virus.

Twilla June Morin, 85, died March 4 at Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington. The center was the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. in early March. The center has seen 129 cases and more than 37 deaths, according to the complaint filed in King County Superior Court...

...Federal regulators investigated the facility in March and found widespread and serious violations, prompting a $611,00 fine by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

According to a report released by federal and state regulators, the facility failed to rapidly identify and manage sick residents, did not notify state officials about the increase in respiratory illness among residents and failed to have a backup plan in the absence of Life Care’s primary physician, who became ill himself and left the facility March 2.

https://www.courthousenews.com/nursi...outbreak-sued/"]https://www.courthousenews.com/nursi...outbreak-sued/

Or this one:

Like the coronavirus, infectious diseases such as pneumonia and flu create by far the most damage among the elderly. Every year, from 75 percent to 90 percent of all flu deaths occur in those age 65 and older. In the 2017–2018 flu season, nearly 51,000 of the 61,099 total deaths from influenza in America occurred among people in that age category. The death rate is particularly high among those over 75, who form the core population of the 2 million or so nursing-home residents in the U.S. Nearly two-thirds of those residents are 75 or over.

Despite these figures, half of all states don’t require that workers in nursing homes be vaccinated against the flu, according to a CDC survey, even though studies have shown that workers are often the principal means by which infections make their way into a home. One impediment: worker opposition. In 2009, for instance, New York State officials, facing a swine flu epidemic and a bad flu season, decreed that all health-care workers, including nursing aids, be vaccinated, over objections from the 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare union, whose president called the rule “unprecedented.” Several months later, facing lawsuits against the order, New York revoked it, claiming that there was not enough vaccine available...

...Many nursing homes also don’t do a good job of training staff in infection prevention, including basic procedures like identifying patients with emerging symptoms and isolating them, wearing protective gear around those infected, and getting the proper anti-viral treatments started. Studies reveal that up to 40 percent of nursing homes receive deficiency citations on their infection-control procedures, including the Washington State facility that was the site of the coronavirus outbreak in Seattle, which now faces up to $600,000 in fines. Though each facility is supposed to have an infection-control staffer, 60 percent of these staffers at homes studied by researchers hadn’t received specialized training, according to a 2018 survey. Staffers at only 3 percent of the facilities were fully certified in controlling infections....

...Nursing homes have also been less than frank about their preparations. A 2018 study by Kaiser Health of nursing-home payroll records gathered by Medicare found that 70 percent of the facilities had fewer workers on duty than they were reporting to the government. Though the CMS doesn’t set required staffing levels, it makes recommendations, which many homes don’t observe. “The majority of days, nursing home staffing levels are below what the CMS expects,” one author of the Kaiser study said. “That is when quality-of-care problems are going to emerge.”

https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-epidemic-nursing-homes

[SAN compnerd]

We had 3 months before it hit us and we did nothing except a travel ban that only blocked Chinese nationals. <snip>

The response team was setup in mid January. travel restrictions were put in place in late January, followed by a ban on the 29th. Quarantine setup at March ARB and Travis AFB Jan 29.

It wan't until the 9th of January that the Chinese shared the genome. You can't develop a vaccine without a sample of the virus to work with. I don't think China ever shared a sample or any other data.

HTF do you get three months from China only sharing data with the world on January 9th? They were not forthcoming or cooperative, they tried to hide this and the cooperation was feeble and minimal, not to mention allowing international flights from Wuhan while they locked down internally.

It's been 8 months and we still can't buy N95s in the stores.

We had almost zero manufactuing capability for PPE when this started. Most of it was made in China. Even the fricken Chinese had shortages, that's one reason they had the WHO lie to the world on January 14th in a tweet saying this was not human transmissible, they then sent people all over the globe buying up warehouses full of PPE.

Once it became evident that we would need lots of PPE the Chinese had already purchased much of what was available and the rest of the world now needed PPE too.

Which part of that is Trump's fault? If the stockpile had been maintained by the army of useless congressmen and bureaucrats we would have been much better off, but that stockpile was depleted under Obama and none of the useless slobs in the CDC, the NIAID, the congress or any other part of the government did crap to replenish it.

Again, which part of that is Trump's fault exactly?

Every day a thousand people die while in Germany, Italy, and Norway they have 1, 1, and 0.

None of those countries had 100k people marching in the streets of every major city every night for the past 90 days. How is that Trumps fault?

The entire federal top leadership is screwing this whole crisis up horribly, is continuing to screw it up. We are the most developed country in the world, we've spent the most money, and yet we are handling it the worst.

Bla bla bla. Fact is that most of the trillions set aside for this has not been spent yet because it was earmarked for things related to the virus. The takeaway from that nugget of info is that we didn't need to spend or allocate so much money because this virus is not as bad as the media has made it out to be.

5.5 million of our countrymen and women are sick. 166,000 are dead. And don't tell me it's fine because most of them were going to die anyway.

CDC director Redfield testified before Congress about a week ago that the death toll is inflated and inaccurate. 5.5 million people are not sick, that's hyperbole, most of them have recovered and the number of currently active cases is quite small although difficult to track as we don't really track recovered patients.

According to this site there are currently 49k people hospitalized, and I question that number.

https://covidtracking.com/data

How many of those infections and deaths are because Trump sent the sick back into nursing homes against the guidance from the CDC? Because about 30k of them are from Cuomo, Murphy and Wolfe doing just that.

We are pouring our money down the drain, getting little for it, and the administration's supporters are still blindly believing the lies and supporting poor administration.

Incorrect. Most of the money has not been spent yet, because it's not needed for the virus. Congress wants trillions more to bail out the Democrat governors and mayors who have managed their cities and states into the ground.

Our testing turnaround time is NOT acceptable if even Trumps own testing chief Giroir says that most people don't get it within 48 hours.

I assume you can provide detailed statistics from every state on testing turn around times to support the above assertion?

It's funny people believe that withholding payment for slow tests won't work, but at the same time they believe that withholding the covid19 reimbursement bonus - a laughably small amount for anyone who knows what hospital bills are like - would immediately reduce our case numbers.

doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you stop paying labs for tests the labs will stop doing tests and the time to get one done will increase due to the smaller number of labs doing testing. Only an idiot would not see that as the outcome of such misguided stupidity.

And again Dr. Redfield of the CDC testified about a week ago to congress that the reimbursement for wuflu patients was a perverse incentive and make the death toll inaccurate.

whatever. believe what you want, believe it's all about the election. our country will remain mired in coronavirus because our leadership and a large segment of our population remains convinced that the election is more important than handling this pandemic properly.

I believe the facts and the facts show that you are regurgitating the MSM narrative that failure to stop an act of God is clearly Trumps fault, the purpose of which is not to help anyone be more well informed or to help one make good decisions during this crisis, but to politicize and weaponize this crisis for political power in the fall election.

[bigbossman]

The response team was setup in mid January.......(snipped for brevity)

Oh, SNAP.

[duenor]

Yes, I read through much of it, just quoted the part where it speaks to the "skilled" part you referenced. I have been in a few as well, and hospitals and I can say the level of care and hygiene between the two is not comparable.[/URL]

That is certainly true, but that's because one is $5000 a month whereas the other is $5000 a day.

But to say that sending gramps home to live with a family members completely unprepared to deal with a COVID19 patient is better than sending them back to SNFs or even LTCFs doesn't make sense.

Let's say an elderly family member suddenly got COVID19. He was in the hospital for two weeks, now he's been released to continue recovery. He's still quite infectious, and has to be on supplemental oxygen. You've got 48 hours to get ready. Would you be prepared to take care of him? Would you be able to keep yourself and your family from getting sick? Do you and your family have the basic expertise required? Are you able to stay home to take care of him for the next 4-6 weeks?

[comblock]

when check engine light goes on in your carcyou cough up the $300 bucks for diagnostics.

[Den60]

That is certainly true, but that's because one is $5000 a month whereas the other is $5000 a day.

But to say that sending gramps home to live with a family members completely unprepared to deal with a COVID19 patient is better than sending them back to SNFs or even LTCFs doesn't make sense.

Let's say an elderly family member suddenly got COVID19. He was in the hospital for two weeks, now he's been released to continue recovery. He's still quite infectious, and has to be on supplemental oxygen. You've got 48 hours to get ready. Would you be prepared to take care of him? Would you be able to keep yourself and your family from getting sick? Do you and your family have the basic expertise required? Are you able to stay home to take care of him for the next 4-6 weeks?

If the goal is to kill more people then we should promote sending infected patients back to their nursing homes where they are sure to spread it to others who are, actually, at high risk to die from it. Hey, we can't kill them twice.

[SAN compnerd]

when check engine light goes on in your carcyou cough up the $300 bucks for diagnostics.

No need, I have a $15 bluetooth SCAN tool gizmo that connects to an app on my phone with easy links to the causes of the error code. App was free, used it many times now.