Ten years ago today I triggered Seattle with this post on MLK Day in the progressive-decadent free weekly The Stranger after someone unwisely gifted me a week guest-blogging there. Life goes so fast.
Washington State has moved to limit elective surgeries, ostensibly in anticipation of a covid surge
WASHINGTON (KPTV) – Patient volumes at some Northwest hospitals are soaring with the latest surge in COVID-19 cases and health care staffing shortages.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee announced a pause on non-urgent medical procedures for four weeks to get the state through the predicted peak in hospitalizations. Some hospitals in both Washington and Oregon have already started scaling back non-emergency procedures to help with the resource strain.
“This is difficult, but it is a necessary decision to make sure people get access that is life-saving right now,” Gov. Inslee said during a news conference Thursday.
Inslee said staffing problems stem from both an increase in COVID-19 patients needing care and more health care workers getting sick…
Governor Inslee’s emergency order – announced Thursday – gives physicians the discretion to determine what is a “non-urgent” procedure.
In what has become standard in news reports about Covid, KPTV above makes no attempt to quantify the proportion–how much is it too few workers and how much is it too many sick? It appears to be standard practice to deliberately obscure the details to always create the impression of Hospitals Overwhelmed by Covid Patients.
Inslee said staffing problems stem from both an increase in COVID-19 patients needing care and more health care workers getting sick.
Washington State Hospital Association Communications Director Tim Pfarr said the situation has escalated at some Washington hospitals to the point of “crisis levels of staffing,” meaning medical facilities are asking employees to come back from sick leave “sooner than normal.”
Meanwhile here the Oregon Health Authority, which oversees the state’s medicaid program and has its own office of diversity and inclusion, of course, was not lax in September 2020 in taking advantage of the crisis to promote anti-white bias; at the height of the Covid hysteria OHA announced it would write “equity” into decisions of life and death (boldface added throughout):
Since 2014, Oregon health care providers, ethicists and emergency preparedness experts have invested significant time and effort to plan for this scenario as captured within Oregon’s former crisis care guidance. In September 2020, the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) announced its decision to no longer reference or depend on previously established guidance, due to its potential for perpetuating discrimination and health inequities. Over the past month OHA has begun meetings with community partners and health care experts in order to co-create a new and inclusive process with the goal of developing revised crisis care guidance centered on health equity. Further engagement and planning are underway to co-create that process.
(…)
Crisis care plans should take an additional equity-based approach to resource allocation by considering longstanding disparities and proactively work to reverse those inequities in concert with policies of non-discrimination protections.
(…)
As we issue this initial statement of principles, OHA remains committed to urgently continuing our parallel work to co-create new crisis care guidance with our community partners and healthcare providers in Oregon. We recognize that extensive work lies ahead to produce not only a new guidance document, but to ensure that health equity is systematically at the center of our health system’s response in the time of a public health crisis and beyond.
(…)
While decision-making as informed by crisis care guidance must align with nondiscrimination laws, these legal obligations may not go far enough. Rather, crisis care guidance must also take into account the longstanding systematic racism and health inequities that have contributed to poorer health for communities of color, tribal communities, and individuals with disabilities. Crisis care plans should take an additional equity-based approach to resource allocation by considering longstanding disparities and proactively work to reverse those inequities in concert with policies of non-discrimination protections.
Operating on the always dubious now ubiquitous theory that “racism” is a “public health crisis”, OHA appears to be identifying illnesses associated with black and brown people (and their habits) and removing them as factors in quality-of-decisions and the like (it’s notable that none other than Dr. Fauci has embraced the dubious theory, at least publicly, even giving a timely interview at the height of the Summer of Floyd promoting the notion as justification for the nationwide rioting that he had previously criticized as “super spreader events”–and he’s now taken up the theme with what passes for enthusiasm in his bland, self-satisfied manner.
Like all theories of white supremacy’s ill effects on non-whites, this one takes no account of the fact whites haven’t had the best health outcomes in the country in a long time, and are now the only group facing declines in health and life expectancy.
Know this, ye weak-kneed boomer reading some other boomer: the propaganda and dispossession of which this latest lie–white racism is killing Black! babies–is part, is the cause of white death, and it follows a model wherein the malice and stupidity of (primarily) black people is weaponized against whites and monetized for blacks (and the grifter class advocating for them). Their criminality, being ascribed to racism, is now being used to carve out privilege in a two-tiered system of justice. Likewise, the general carelessness of black America is cashed-in by its advocates to create a two-tiered system of healthcare. The “Spic-Nig Cycle” comes to mind.
The trend is national, if not global, and it’s no longer the case that locales like progressive Podunk Portland are alone in cutting their own throat to correct imaginary crimes. New York state, once too important to live by the rules it decrees, is in. NY Post:
Prominent medical organizations and the Biden administration are pressing for rules that will move “disadvantaged” populations to the front of the line for scarce medical resources — think vaccines, ventilators, monoclonal antibody treatments. That means everyone else waits longer, in some cases too long.
If the public doesn’t push back soon, getting fair treatment in the hospital will become as hard as getting into college or getting hired on your own merits can be.
Last week, The Post reported that the New York City Taskforce on Racial Inclusion & Equity prioritized the distribution of COVID-19 testing kits to 31 neighborhoods. Staten Island’s racially diverse North Shore got 13 testing sites while the mostly white South Shore got none.
I’m beginning to sense a little hostility here, guys.
untethered 