#preventable deaths

[tearsofrefugees]

Nursing homes strained, 5,000 preventable deaths per year — how US immigration policy is hurting seniors

Newcomers make up 40% of home health aides. Worker shortages could drive up care costs — and leave our elders without help.

[alwaysbewoke]

nice. of course the k-12 education system is underfunded, leading to constant teacher shortages, inadequate facilities, and subpar student outcomes. healthcare access is alarmingly poor, with an unneeded high uninsured rate that leaves many without normal, essential medical services, and even with recent medicaid expansion, mad issues still remain. health outcomes are fckn dismal, with high rates of chronic diseases and preventable deaths. obesity levels are among the worst in the nation (no wonder with all the food insecurity and lack of healthy lifestyle options around there). income inequality is out of control. they got many of their citizens living in poverty with almost zero prospects for improvement. on top of these issues, oklahoma has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, driven by harsh sentencing laws and systemic failings which targets black and poor (because of course (because america)). all on top of a legacy of racial injustices. i mean the tulsa race massacre. need i say more? but yea they should totally spend 1bil on entertainment. that's a totally reasonable thing to do smfh.

[twitterexile]

[indizombie]

Studies in nursing homes -- in China, Washington state and across the U.S. -- found that COVID-19 cases were significantly higher in places with shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE. Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Andrew T. Chan and colleagues found health care workers who didn’t have adequate PPE had a 30% greater chance of infection than colleagues with enough supplies. Black, Hispanic and Asian staffers had the highest risk of catching COVID-19, they found. A University of California, Berkeley study estimated that at least 35% of health care and other essential workers in California who tested positive for COVID-19 were infected at work, amid shortages. “And these are unacceptable deaths, each of which could have been prevented if we had had adequate supply chains in place in advance of the pandemic,” said UC Berkeley Professor William Dow.

Juliet Linderman and Martha Mendoza, 'US medical supply chains failed, and COVID deaths followed', Associated Press

[johnschneiderblog]

Evil triumphed while good people did nothing

If I had lost a loved one in the pandemic, I’m not sure I could find much forgiveness for Deborah Birx and the other inner-circle experts who muttered their disapproval for Trump’s approach to COVID-19 when they should have been screaming from a rooftop.

Dr. Birx was the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force under Trump. No doubt you’ve read, or heard, about the blood-curdling statement she made in a recent interview;

The “vast majority” of the 550,000 American deaths from the virus, Birx said, could have been prevented if the Trump administration (of which she was a part) had acted earlier and more forcefully. 

Who can ever forget those farcical press conferences in which Trump spouted absurdities while Birx stood by looking mildly uncomfortable, but saying very little to contradict Trump’s lies.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily is not a recent revelation for Birx; she knew about it while it was happening.

So, how does she explain her complicity? She says she was trying to work for change from within. She says that even her mild dissent was drawing threats against her safety.

Considering what was at stake, I don’t accept that defense. To paraphrase the famous Edmund Burke quotation: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (and good women) to do nothing.

[indizombie]

The current disaster exists in large part because the US healthcare system is the opposite of what is needed. It is fragmented, discriminatory and designed for corporate profits, not the wellbeing of the public. Even before the pandemic, the United States had the highest number of preventable deaths compared to other wealthy nations and a declining life expectancy. Nearly every facet of the system, which is twice as expensive as other developed countries, is designed to extract profit whether it is the hundreds of private health insurers that compete for the healthiest enrollees while avoiding those with health conditions, or the pharmaceutical corporations that charge whatever the market will bear. Even hospitals are shutting down essential departments such as obstetrics and pediatrics to make space for more lucrative areas like cardiology and orthopedics.

Margaret Flowers, 'The Covid-19 pandemic exposes deep flaws in America’s broken healthcare system', RT

[imkeepinit]

How Many Lives Does US Foreign Aid Save?

We present some estimates for lives saved by US assistance worldwide, with illustrative estimates by recipient country. Our core estimates a

"Give or take, our estimates for each core intervention suggest that on an average day when US foreign assistance is working as it normally does, it saves a little more than 9,000 lives, of which a little more than 6,000 are through bilateral programs or involving in-kind support from the US. While there is surely some resilience in the system that will have prevented that level of mortality, it appears inevitable that the cost in terms of deaths will continue to climb because of the disorder and confusion within USAID and the number of service providers who have already been forced to close down."

[hennethgalad]

we will remember them