There is increasingly good news about vaccines, with now three very promising candidates, that have good possibilities of being available in a six to eight weeks time frame in limited quantities.
However, the rest of the news is dire, especially up here in the American Midwest.
We are now at or over capacity in Minnesota right now. We had built surge capacity, but there is s severe lack of staff. Mayo has 900 staff out sick, the large Allina group has 800 out sick and a big medical system to the NW out at St. Cloud has about 1000 out sick.
The situation in ND is worse. The governor there has asked staff with Covid-19 to stay at their posts unless too sick to work. This is just plain wrong. Someone we know is on a vent in Grand Forks.
At yesterdays ND webinar, the ID physician for Sanford Health Fargo, admitted they were now sending people home who should be in hospital. This is really grim. He also provided good data that in fact at least 400,000 have now died of Covid-19 in the US and not 250,000. That was as of yesterday. This was based on a careful analysis of excess deaths.
According to figures release Minnesota was at 93% ICU capacity and filling up fast yesterday.
My next door neighbors are a husband and wife team who work for Deloitte and Touche. I leaned today from the husband, that his wife had spent the greater part of the day exploring the options of transferring patients to Canada. I have no idea how much success that was meeting with.
At a news conference earlier in the week, the governor admitted that they were exploring the idea of allowing staff to operate beyond their scope of practice, with immunity from liability. This seems like a really bad idea.
Last night the Governor announced that he will place the state under virtual lockdown for a month. No one from any two households can mix. So only people who reside in a given residence can celebrate Thanksgiving together. Draconian though this may seem, this seems to me far too little to late.
At the Governor's news conference today, I detect an element of panic starting to set in.
According to news reports, FEMA have been asked to provide more ambulances for transfer of patients between institutions.
My contacts tell me that the situation is dire.
This is to a very large extent the fault of President Trump's severe negligence and also disbursing false and misinformation by the shovel full. I hope a way can be found to prosecute him on the charge of hundreds and thousands of counts of negligent homicide. In my view he is now one of the worst mass murderers of history.
If you watch the video I posted above, you will hear medical staff explain that patients who are dying of Covid-19 still believe this pandemic is hoax. It is now well documented that it is not rare, the dying patients still can believe it is a hoax and insist they are being lied to and are actually dying of something else.
As the weather continues to get colder, I fear a real catastrophe developing in the upper Midwest. We can not put up tent hospitals, and could not staff them if we could.
We had a surge hospital set up in the Spring surge in the Twin Cities. However there were no funds to maintain it due largely to lack of availability of Federal funds. This has already been converted to a homeless shelter.
My wife and I are not going anywhere. We are not letting anyone into the home at this time, and probably won't until we are vaccinated. If the situation worsens, and we should fall victim to Covid-19 or even something else, we likely would not take a hospital bed if things worsen. That is probably the right thing to do at our ages, but it would depend on how things develop as far as capacity is concerned. However I expect the situation to worsen over the next few weeks, and quite quickly. Some counties in Minnesota now have over twice the infection rate of the worst affected places in Europe.
One case report from our family, which brings it nearer home. My brother's son and daughter in law came down with moderately severe Covid-19 not requiring hospital about a month ago. Recently his daughter in law was out exercising the dog. She got so short of breath she could not move. She had dial 999, the UK emergency number for and ambulance. She is being worked up for long term illness for Covis-19 and told to do only very light exercise for no longer than 5 minutes. My suspicion is she has myocarditis.
We had a recent case of a 17 year old champion dancer who was severely ill in Children's Hospital Minneapolis recently. According to press reports she has myocarditis. She has been told not to return to dancing.
As far as the report above about the early Italian case, it is probably true. We had a case from my home town reported recently. That had a male die of a strange pneumonia back in early December 2019 in Medway Maritime hospital. They did keep samples. Recently they went back and looked at the samples. It is confirmed he died of Covid-19 according to press reports. So the Chinese hid this from the world for a long time, for which they need to be held to account.
In Denmark there is a row over the culling of mink, with the animal right groups asking for the premiers resignation for ordering the culling of mink, which they say was illegal.
Meanwhile Ireland, which has not had a case of the mutant Covid-19 strain is culling all its mink farms.
So this a collection of the odds and ends I have accumulated lately in no particular order of significance.
The tragedy is that in most of the Western democracies this has been allowed to become far worse than it needed to have been. That is the real tragedy. As soon as this crisis is in the rear view mirror, we need to start mitigation and planning for the next one immediately.
