The intensive care rooms at St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center are full, each a blinking jungle of tubes, wires and mechanical breathing machines. The patients nestled inside are a lot alike: All unvaccinated, mostly middle-aged or younger, reliant on life support and locked in a silent struggle against COVID-19.
Idaho hit a grim COVID-19 trifecta this week, reaching record numbers of emergency room visits, hospitalizations and ICU patients. Medical experts say the deeply conservative state will likely see 30,000 new infections a week by mid-September.
With a critical shortage of hospital beds and staff and one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates, Idaho health providers are growing desperate and preparing to follow crisis standards of care, which call for giving scarce resources to patients most likely to survive.
St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center invited The Associated Press into its restricted ICUs this week in hopes that sharing the dire reality would prompt people to change their behavior.
https://www.idahostatejournal.com/news/local/loss-of-hope-idaho-hospitals-crushed-by-covid-19-surge/article_c0e6ed49-2f9c-554c-ab96-2e2cd0e0dff4.html
If the freedumb riders aren't affected by this, they sure aren't going to change their minds because of something President Biden said. They'll just take their horse meds and go on their merry way. There should be lots of job openings at mortuaries pretty soon. You know, digging holes.
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