[spike021]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

It seems like supply is outpacing delivery. Obviously things will ramp up, but at the current rate, it will take 5-10 years to vaccine everyone. While 14-20 million doses will be delivered to the states by the end of the month, only 2.6-3 million doses will be given. Part of that is because of the holidays and weather, but it needs to improve quickly.

Meanwhile, yesterday saw 235,775 new cases and 3,882, and we crossed the 350k deaths mark.

On a separate note, all of the precautions for COVID has dramatically reduced our cases of the flu. In fact, I haven’t seen a single flu positive patient. A coworker says she saw one back in November. We have been doing a rapid COVID/FluA/B/RSV panel on all admits and suspected patients, yet we really haven’t seen any flu cases. Typically we have 3-5 of 26 ER rooms with positive patients mid day. In 2018 we saw one day with 12 of 26 beds with flu positive patients. It seems like with vaccines and masks, we could relatively eliminate flu cases and dramatically reduce deaths. Proportionally deaths wouldn’t fall as much, but would still greatly drop. Not saying we should all mask every winter—just pointing out that if there was any doubt that masks were effective then that has been resolved.

Definitely anecdotal, but I can believe it.

Plus, while others may not like this idea, Asian countries have been doing the mask thing for flu/hay fever season for a long time. I'm sure, COVID or not, if we started trying to do the same thing we'd be better off.