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[misko27]

Now now MSH. Let's not confuse China with some small country at risk of being run roughshod on by the world powers. It is a world power. It has its own international network of influence and patronage. People being outraged at China across the world - justifiably or not! - will have about as much effect as being outraged at the US does.

[WealthyRadish]

It's possible to criticize the political scapegoating of China without also defending them generally. I think MSH's concern is for the attempt by domestic politicians to deflect the mishandling of the outbreak and the growing economic crisis away from themselves and our system generally, and that's distinct from thinking the calls by the Eight-Nation Alliance to punish the Celestial Empire will really be heeded.

[Iduno]

Well, that's normal. Lucky he didn't get pushed out a window like his peers in Russia.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

my god

he was on the verge of proving covid doesn't even fucking real

damn it hillary

[Telgin]

Well, that's normal. Lucky he didn't get pushed out a window like his peers in Russia.

Nobody does research alone on this kind of stuff so I'm sure there's a research group with all of his data.  I wonder what will become of that.

[Dunamisdeos]

my god

he was on the verge of proving covid doesn't even fucking real

damn it hillary

That's like, literally half of the replies on twitter. Possibly more than half.

Democrats shot him. They want this to continue in hopes it makes Trump look bad.

[nenjin]

Talking to a customer today on the phone:

"Yeah and like, the paramedics weren't allowed to do CPR. And so they report his heart attack as a covid death, so they get more money." The implication being, it's not that bad and this is all some kind of hoax still by moneyed interests.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I truly, truly hope that the harsh reality of medical work in triage conditions never gets publicly reported. People are paranoid are upset about fake stories like this, there'll be murders if they ever hear the real ones.

[ChairmanPoo]

Talking to a customer today on the phone:

"Yeah and like, the paramedics weren't allowed to do CPR. And so they report his heart attack as a covid death, so they get more money." The implication being, it's not that bad and this is all some kind of hoax still by moneyed interests.

You know, in Spain and Italy there were no blanket DNR orders as in the UK and the US were suggesting and did in at least some places.

Some dutch newspaper actually speculated early in the pandemic that the ICU collapse was our own fault  (blamed our "culture") and we should have triaged away anyone old oe infirm by default(this was about a week before the ICUs in the Netherlands were filled to the brink and the Dutch goverment panicked).

This post is not about that newspaper article. This is about PPE, duty, and what to do in this shitfest of a situation.

What I wanted to address instead is how the New York Times wrote an article about Spanish "healthcare kamikazes"
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000007051789/coronavirus-ppe-shortage-health-care-workers.html

And how we now have about 40.000 infected. Tbh its a wonder only 60-100 or so died (actual number is unclear...the goverment doesn't track it -heh- and  medical and nursinc councils reports 41 doctors and 3 nurses respectively, but noone is really tracking auxiliaries and orderlies so its probably about twice as much).

I dont know what the right thing to do is. I don't think medical personnel should work without protection as that makes you part of the problem. Apparently a nurse with experience with ebola wrote an email that goes around US hospitals in that direction: "there are no emergencies in a pandemic." The gist of the matter was thst first you don your PPE and then you act, whatever happens. If you get infected you're part of the problem, not the solution. The problem being of course that there was no PPE.

Again I don't know what's the right answer in that regard. I think healthcare workers are prone to develop a certain martyr complex which sometimes leads to unwise actions. I do get the impression that in Spain we're worse in that regard than in the UK and Ireland. I think this is encouraged by the system because it makes it cheaper for them if you will work while unwell or will do overtime without pay.
I think it's probably a bad idea to do any of that even in normal circumstances. I think during a pandemic working while sick is a bad idea for obvious reasons, but so is "sacrificing" yourself working without equipment, or doing overtime to the extent you are exahusted. Getting yourself infected is not going to help anyone.  On the other hand with global shortages of PPE there are tough decisions to make in these scenarios.  But there are no good answers

[ChairmanPoo]

By the way, I'm highly skeptical about the justification the NHS gave about the high ratio of "BAME" about the healthcare dead. I dont think it's genetics (heck these same guys were speculating about covid19 being worse in Europe in general and UK in particular because of haplogroup R-M269 which contradicts that theory and is probably bullshit too).  I don't think it's some odd racist thing, either. I think the reason is far simpler: they were more likely to be migrant HCW, which in turn are more likely to depend on work visas to stay in the country, and wages to pay the rent, so they have to stick around no matter how dangerous, while nonmigrant HCW probably have comparatively more opportunities to decline risky contracts.

[Starver]

At least part of it might be that 'native' brits are often much more staid. Less sociable, less inherently tactile, less likely to live in multigenerational homes[1] and all kinds of other reasons. Similar to early comments as to why the famously effusive Italians were hit hard in the very beginning. Possibly just as wrong/irrelevent, but the stereotypes do at least  sometimes bear out.

[1] Not directly relevent to healthcare workers, but adds to the chance of them being exposed outside of the clinical zone, while not under the ægis of what PPE they did have.

[ChairmanPoo]

The British are being whacked by covid now. I dont think culture has very much to do with any of this TBH. Asia, Europe, and the Americas got whacked. The ones that aren´t getting whacked quite so much, they belong to countries that either reacted early enough and with the right measures (most of them small... I think smaller places have an advantage for fast reactions), or have advantages in weather or geography, or all of the above (the extreme case being NZ... with a goverment that responded early, is in a wet island temperateish-warm, and isolated from everywhere else). The rest, eh... it makes little difference in the end. I think that when all this is said and done we´ll find that there are no major differences as far as the gross numbers are concerned between the UK, France, Spain and Italy, and the ones that do exist are due to delays or speedups in responses. 

[Starver]

I was mainly addressing your point about the ratio of BAME victims against non-BAME (when other factors such as relative numbers in the nursing jobs, etc, are dealt with).

As to why Britain, across all groups, is apparently so bad, we'd really need more data (I want those multilevel trendlines I mentioned a while ago, and especially a comparison of the original "hospital only" deaths line with the more recent "hospital plus care homes" tally), noting that Belgium famously came out as most-per-capita but that's with a greater transparency than most other countries (c.f. North Korea?).

(The per capita figures that we have, being variably recorded, were actually not that bad compared to select other countries, but there probably should be an intermediate assessment between total and per capita that takes account of the dimension of connectivity. R₀ across an archipelago nation compared with R₀ across a single island of the same total population would be different, and then enacting/not enacting measures to modify contact will be differently effective on the subsequent R_t curves.)

[scriver]

I dont know what the right thing to do is. I don't think medical personnel should work without protection as that makes you part of the problem. Apparently a nurse with experience with ebola wrote an email that goes around US hospitals in that direction: "there are no emergencies in a pandemic." The gist of the matter was thst first you don your PPE and then you act, whatever happens. If you get infected you're part of the problem, not the solution. The problem being of course that there was no PPE.

This is my intuitive feeling about this situation as well. I feel the same about healthcare's abusive circumstances in normal, non-epidemic circumstances to be honest. Doctors and nurses should not have to de-health themselves to tend to the healths of others. A worn out health worker just means less healths being tended in the long run.

But of course, healthcare workers aren't even allowed to strike any more here. Can't have people making noice about untenable situations.

"BAME" ... HCW

LOSABTAN

Sweden also had a lot of problems with immigrant populations early on, specifically east Africans (from the Horn) in Stockholm.

I see three major reasons, two which are more substantiated and one that is completely my-own-unknowledgeable-musings.

1. Beginning with the armchair theoretics: Its well known that tuberculosis is more common abroad than in Sweden. It stand to reason that TBC then is also more common among immigrants to Sweden. Combine with socioeconomic circumstances such as crowded living spaces and you're likely to have more spread than the national average among immigrant communities. TBC takes a toll on the lungs, which could mean being more suspectible to oxygen deprivation.

But enough intellectual navel guessing! On to the real points.

2. Socioeconomic stuff. It's already been broached upon so I'm not going to repeat it, but yeah, crowded living spaces and multigenerational homes means bigger spread to risk groups. Here in Sweden, lots of eastern African woman work as nurses in health and elderly care. Circumstances for eldercare nurses in Stockholm are atrocious (It's a hyper right wing stronghold after all, the worst kind of hive of scum and villainy). An offensive amount of nurses in this field are temp workers that are called in on a daily basis, who has no steady employment but have to take what work they are offered. This means no employment security, which means no healthcare benefits, which means no ability to say "no I have a tiny cold symptom today, I have to stay at home", like the authorities want you to do, because they can't afford not taking a job. Yes, the disgusting neoliberals basically turned eldercare nursing business in to a fucking day labourer system where the nurses who care for their fucking parents and grandparents have to sit around metaphorical street corners and wait for some metaphorical truck to drive by and randomly pick some of them out to work that day. Of course, the vast majority of the nurses abused this way are immigrant workers who are less likely to be in a union or know about the rights they have and vastly less likely to rock the boat regardless if they do know them. And people scoff at me when I say the open migration policies are right wing politics an inherently racist. There's absolutely nothing racist about creating an immigrant slave class to serve your educated upper class asses at all!

But I'm being side tracked by my own bitterness. Let's go to reason three.

3. Immigrants do not follow Swedish news and media like Swedes do. They have channels in their own languages or other languages closer to their motherlands'. Media here in Sweden have treated this point as if it is somehow racist, but it's how all people are. Swedes who emigrate do the same.  Hell, we had this problem with foreign university students when the schools started closing or going online -- lots of European people studying here only followed their own media and didn't understand that they were allowed to go outside since Sweden hadn't closed down. So yeah, immigrant communities aren't reached by messages from our authorities to the same extent. They listen to the messages from their own media instead. There is a huge gap in effective mass communication here where there's lots of room for shit to go bad. And it went very bad this time.

The big thing is number two though. Even if a nurse (and, by the way, I am this focused on nurses because an overwhelming amount of the deaths in Sweden are from eldercare and similar homes) do get the messages the authorities are sending out they can't stay at home when the system they make a living in has been designed to treat them like things to be spent and thrown away rather than people who deserve the same treatment, benefits and security that we expect for ourselves. It's an outrageous situation. People here are getting very upset over how it could hit the elder homes so badly and there's a lot of blaming the immigrant groups rumbling in the background. I think there's some things that needs to be acknowledged (for clarity: in response to point three,, immigrant interest group spokespeople has basically gone "well it's not our group's fault they didn't get the memo, the government didn't do enough to inform them") like how it's not the authorities job to kick down doors and throw brochures at people, people have to show an interest in taking in information themselves. But this isn't a fucking bed that was made by immigrants. This is just a bed that immigrants tried to make a living in. This bed was made by the politics of the neo-liberal burgeoise and their ever ongoing quest of shitting on poor people.

[martinuzz]

In Pakistan, the government has decided that despite rising numbers of infected and dead, they will have to end the lockdown.
The poor workers in Pakistan cannot survive any longer without income.
If they don't lift the lockdown, more people will die of starvation than of corona.