THREAD
I need to rethink things.

People have been shaming me & others for months now for speaking up against the #COVID19 shutdowns.
Hospitals! Hospitals are overwhelmed!
They may be right. I have to share some quotes about our hospitals.

Read to the end please 1/

These are actual quotes from pieces I've just read. I don't know why I've been ignoring this. Let me say that I'm serious about my respect for frontline workers. I'm confident THEY are NOT the ones calling for us to lose our jobs so they can do theirs. Politicians did that.
2/

"Tallia says his hospital is 'managing, but just barely,' at keeping up with the increased number of sick patients in the last three weeks. The hospital’s urgent-care centers have also been inundated, and its outpatient clinics have no appointments available.”
3/

"Dr. Bernard Camins, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that UAB Hospital cancelled elective surgeries scheduled for Thursday and Friday of last week to make more beds available"
4/

“We had to treat patients in places where we normally wouldn’t, like in recovery rooms,” says Camins. “The emergency room was very crowded, both with sick patients who needed to be admitted”
5/

"In CA… several hospitals have set up large 'surge tents' outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat … patients. Even then, the LA Times reported this week, emergency departments had standing-room only, and some patients had to be treated in hallways.”
6/

"In Fenton, Missouri, SSM Health St. Clare Hospital has opened its emergency overflow wing, as well as all outpatient centers and surgical holding centers, to make more beds available to patients who need them. Nurses are being “pulled from all floors to care for them,”
7/

“it’s making their pre-existing conditions worse,” she says. “More and more patients are needing mechanical ventilation due to respiratory failure”
8/

“From Laguna Beach to Long Beach, emergency rooms were struggling to cope with the overwhelming cases… and had gone into 'diversion mode,' during which ambulances are sent to other hospitals.”
9/

“Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they’ll spread… Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots to triage the hordes of… patients.”
10/

“There’s a little bit of a feeling of being in the trenches. We’re really battling these infections to try to get them under control,” McKinnell said. “We’re still not sure if this is going to continue … “
11/

"At Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, waiting rooms turned into exam areas as a medical tent was built in order to deal with the surge of patients. A Houston doctor said local hospital beds were at capacity”
12/

“Dr. Anthony Marinelli says they've seen a major spike in… cases. It's so overwhelmed the community hospital that they've gone on bypass at times -- that means they tell ambulances to bypass this ER and find another.”
13/

“Dr. Atallah, the chief of emergency medicine at Grady, says the hospital called on a mobile emergency department based nearly 250 miles away to help tackle the increasing patient demand. "At 500-plus patients a day you physically just need the space to put a patient in. “
14/

Our workers are incredible and I know they've been trained to deal with this. But maybe the lockdown folks are correct. Maybe we opened up too quickly. Maybe we should stay in shutdown mode.

I mean nothing like this has ever happened to our hospitals before?!
15/

Except these are all quotes from the 2018 flu season which may have killed as many as 100K Americans. Healthcare workers are amazing. I know they can do their jobs without the rest of us having to forfeit our lives.

End the lockdowns.
Get the kids back to school.
We got this.