re <<I would imagine that, in wide open Alaska, with modicum of care (wear hat, use scarf, wash hands, stay away from other people's pets) would be 99.9% effective in staying safe from Covid.>>
My own multi-layer regimen has the following enhancements...
1) Live in a separate stand-alone house rather than multi-unit housing.
2) Eat high-quality organic food from a modern store designed and owned by a highly-qualified ventilation engineer.
3) Supplement diet with vitamins D3 and B12, minerals, etc.
4) Wear high-quality properly-fitted N95 masks...
5) Get the Pfizer shots and booster.
Alas, very few Alaskans meet these these criteria so we're now recovering from a disastrous Covid-19 Delta variant outbreak. This was a severe crisis for our medical system, care was rationed for several months, and Alaska needed $87 million from FEMA to hire 500 out-of-state medical staff to handle the strain...
Impossible choices inside Alaska’s inundated hospitals
adn.com
Providence Alaska Medical Center is prioritizing care under crisis-care guidelines amid surging COVID-19 cases and short staffing, Other hospitals report equally gut-wrenching scenarios.
By Zaz Hollander - 9/17/2021
Dr. Gina Wilson-Ramirez worked in the Providence Alaska Medical Center emergency room Sunday night, hours after the state’s largest hospital declared crisis standards allowing doctors to ration care.
Wilson-Ramirez worked as an urban search and rescue worker at the Pentagon after the 9/11 attacks. Twenty years ago, after firefighters extinguished lingering hot spots, she donned a Tyvek suit and a respirator and waded into a macabre slurry of thigh-high water, diesel fuel and charred bodies.
This week, she said, is worse.
“It’s worse because we’re deciding who’s going to die and who’s not,” Wilson-Ramirez said. “That definitely had an impact on my life. But nothing compares to having to ration care when there’s a cure available.”
Now people in the state’s medical community say they’re watching a sophisticated hospital system stumble under low staffing levels and a crush of COVID-19 patients spurred by the highly infectious delta variant.
Young pregnant women so sick with the virus they need a ventilator to breathe. People experiencing chest pain, a major heart attack symptom, waiting for hours in the ER. Gravely ill patients dying before they get care — or because someone else with better survival odds was prioritized for treatment.
Alaska is experiencing one of the sharpest surges of COVID-19 in the United States, with more people hospitalized with COVID-19 than at any other time during the pandemic and vaccination rates in the nation’s bottom third.
But the state is also uniquely isolated, with a vulnerable health system centered on a few big hospitals that normally transfer patients out to Seattle or Portland, where facilities are now also overwhelmed.
Portable toilets are placed outside the emergency department entrance at Providence Alaska Medical Center on Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021. The emergency department is overwhelmed and is asking people to wait in their cars, sometimes for hours, before being seen. (Loren Holmes / ADN) |
