Hospital Layoffs and Pay Cuts Are Happening During the Pandemic
The United States healthcare system could be facing a bigger crisis than CoVID-19. While New York Governor Andrew Cuomo begs for healthcare volunteers to combat coronavirus, hospitals throughout the country are furloughing or laying off employees at the highest rate since 1990.
On April 6th, the West Virginia University Health System announced that some of their employees will see temporary 25% pay cuts during the pandemic. As the hospital system is seeing less clinical volume, WVU Health is moving people to new roles, and those who are not matched to a new role will be sent home with a 75% salary guarantee. This new policy will be reevaluated in mid-May.
The WVU Health System hospitals are only one example of the grim reality facing many healthcare workers. According to Altarum, a nonprofit research and consulting firm…
Health care has traditionally cushioned the blow of non-health sector job losses during and immediately following economic downturns…This time, health care looks to be contributing to instead of counterbalancing an accelerating economic calamity. Health care lost 43,000 jobs this month, by far the largest monthly drop in our data series going back to 1990.”
In the case of West Virginia, the state has seen relatively few coronavirus cases during the pandemic, with the number of total reported cases in the state less than 1000. In additional cost-cutting measures, the WVU Health System will institute a hiring freeze, suspend employer match to all employee’s 403(b) for the remainder of 2020, and the health system CEO, hospital CEOs, and certain senior executives will see a 10% percent salary reduction for the next six months.
WVU Medicine employees are lucky. Workers who are sent home will still be making a significant portion of their salary. It’s likely that the employees sent home by the hospital administration will be in lower levels positions or less busy areas of the hospitals.
According to Indeed.com, people in administrative assistant and registered nurse positions at WVU Medicine make $30,000 and $51,000, respectively. Twenty-five percent of these salaries represent a significant chunk of income. Yet health system CEO, hospital CEOs, and certain senior executives are only receiving 10% pay cuts. The average CEO salary in West Virginia is $720,000. If the CEOs of the eleven hospitals in the WVU Health System make that average salary were made to take the same temporary 25% pay cut as hospital nurses and administrators, the hospital system could potentially save $1.98 million. Why are hospital workers on the front lines of our healthcare system being asked to sacrifice further when there are those in much better positions to step up financially?
Coronavirus Could Be Devastating for the Navajo Nation
The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the U.S., saw its first case of COVID-19 on March 27th, and since then has seen over 1,300 positive tests for the virus. Most people in the Navajo Nation live in rural areas, which should limit the spread of the virus, but the tribe is facing several challenges in dealing with the Coronavirus.
Many natives have high rates of illnesses that make the community vulnerable to COVID-19 like asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. A history of mining, especially uranium mining, on the reservation has resulted in higher rates of reproductive cancers. In addition, one in 2,000 Navajos are born with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a genetic disorder where a child is basically born without an immune system, although mandatory screening of Navajo children at birth enables the tribe to treat the condition.
In addition to these health challenges, the Navajo Nation is extremely poor. The United States has an official poverty rate of 12.6 percent. The rate of poverty in the Navajo Nation for families is 46.5 percent, with 14.9 percent of people living in extreme poverty.
Amenities that Americans take for granted, like plumbing, electricity, and paved roads, are not a guarantee on the reservation. One in ten Navajos doesn’t have electricity. In Apache county Arizona where the capital of the Navajo Nation, Window Rock, is located, Native American households are 13 times more likely to lack complete plumbing. Forty percent of the Native nation does not have indoor plumbing. The CDC handwashing guidelines are incompatible with life under these conditions.
A Poor People Pandemic
The Navajo Nation government has taken steps to stop the spread of COVID-19, with President Jonathan Nez declaring a weekend curfew on April 12th, and the Navajo Department of Health mandating the use of masks outside the home on April 19th. Even with these measures, the Navajo Nation will see higher COVID-19 infection rates and deaths, much like other poor and systematically disadvantaged communities across the country.
This worldwide socioeconomic experiment is just fascinating to me. Oil is at something like negative $37 a barrel right now – meaning they’ll pay you to take it off their hands. Instead of “goodbye,” it’s now “stay safe.” The environment is showing incredible resiliency. People are cooking their own food at home. Almost every kid is homeschooled. People are spending more time with their families, less time driving, budgeting smarter (not buying useless crap), eating better, and in many other ways, people are just living better.
This is not to say that people aren’t suffering. For the most privileged, loneliness leading to depression is a big issue. For the less privileged, working through a pandemic that people believe can kill them can be stressful, to say the least – not to mention moms dealing with kids out of school and daycare, being stuck with abusive family members, etc.
But all-in-all, the virus seems a lot like the internet. It’s caused a lot of problems, but it’s also doing us a lot of good (like it or not), and it’s shining a spotlight on corruption and inadequacies (like those of the world’s financial systems).
For all of you conspiracy buffs, there’s a lot of really strange stuff happening too.
Hospitals Are Empty
Not all of them, but many hospitals, and even some hospitals in the hardest-hit areas, are doing very little business outside of the wards that are being used for COVID-19 cases.
One would likely think that with this pandemic and all of the job losses, the safest place to have a job would be at a hospital. One would be wrong.
This doesn’t seem to be talked about at all… People are losing their shifts and paychecks and jobs. We only had 5 people in the whole ER when they sent me home. My agency sent out an email blast basically saying that there are a lot of people struggling to find shifts.
The media tells us that our national healthcare system pushed to the brink, yet emergency rooms are nearly empty.
Yale New Haven Hospital, where I work, has almost 300 people stricken with Covid-19, and the numbers keep rising — and yet we are not yet at capacity because of a marked decline in our usual types of patients. In more normal times, we never have so many empty beds.
Why are hospitals empty? A few reasons. For one, electives have been canceled. But that doesn’t explain the empty emergency rooms. What else is going on?
Heart attacks, strokes, acute appendicitis, and acute gall bladder disease cases have reduced dramatically. Some suspect this may be a result of people not seeking healthcare when they need it due to financial concerns or fear of contracting the virus, but this doesn’t hold water. We would hear reports about the massive amounts of people dying at home and the people would be talking about it incessantly. But we’re not. So what’s going on? I have three hypotheses. First of all, as I already wrote, I think people are living better. I think this is the most significant variable, but, maybe people really are getting just as sick as they were getting before, but they’re not dying because hospitals kill people at a higher rate than the diseases they seek care for. It’s a pretty bold conclusion, but from a natural health perspective, it makes a lot of sense. The third one isn’t really a hypothesis; this is definitely happening. People dying from the aforementioned illnesses like heart failure are being categorized as COVID-19 deaths. And this makes sense. If someone has been suffering from a chronic autoimmune issue and they contract Coronavirus, who’s to say what killed them?
You probably know where we stand. It wasn’t the virus. But that’s how it’s going to be counted – maybe he or she would have lived another 20 years with a bad heart. But while this can account for a radical decrease in certain kinds of deaths like cardiac arrest, nobody’s blaming COVID-19 on appendixes bursting and many other diseases that are affecting us so much less frequently.
With poor testing, unscrupulous motives (from partisan governance to big pharma), and the many other complications involved, it will take years to get a real death toll, if ever.
But that’s not all. A recent study says Coronavirus has reduced California traffic accidents by half! If this is true for the entire country, that likely means that 1,500 people a month that would have died from car accidents since the shutdown did not die.
If coronavirus were an environmental activist there would be none better in the history of the world. This little tiny virus has cut world emissions by more than half for months! It brought the cost of oil down to negative numbers. It reduced human traffic and interference and it’s ruining the finances of some of the most polluting industries in the world. And the world is thanking us for it.
In China, it’s estimated that the Coronavirus lockdown likely saved around 77,000 lives thanks to air pollution reduction. I have the urge to say here that future environmental catastrophes will make the coronavirus look like a hiccup, but the reality is this pandemic is an environmental calamity caused, or at the very least exacerbated, by how we’ve treated the environment. And more pandemics are coming.
How many lives are being saved all over the world due to less air pollution? And how many lives will we have saved because we (hopefully!) take the lessons learned from this pandemic and apply them to our economy and how we treat ourselves and the environment?
Now you may be thinking, “Yeah, but I don’t see how you can claim millions of lives saved.” I think we’re over a million already, but for millions of lives saved, just consider the animal lives.
Since many believe the virus originated at a market selling wild animals in China, the spotlight is on the global wildlife trade. China wants to put a stop to illegal trafficking and poaching of wild animals. This would be especially good for the pangolins, the world’s most trafficked mammal, and the animal initially believed to have spread COVID-19 to humans.
In cities and towns across the world, wildlife has been exploring the deserted streets. Deer, monkeys, boars, and all kinds of animals are being spotted wandering around in large cities. Animals are able to reproduce more successfully. Pandas are even finally having sex!
How many lives do two months of radically reduced human intervention save in the world if you include all of the animals? Hard to say, but I think we’ve easily hit a million if we’re including mammals, reptiles, and birds.
But it’s not all good news for the environment. The EPA is barely functioning, if at all. There are plenty of bad actors taking advantage of lax oversite. And these monkeys are hungry and angry!
We Have To Learn To Live With It
Plus, there will be no working vaccine for the coronavirus and the many evolutions it goes through. It won’t work any better than the flu shot. And more viruses are coming.
We need strong immune systems. This requires eating well. Restaurants do not serve healthy food. Packaged food is almost never good for you. A lot of people are noticing how much better they feel physically with the slower-paced, less consumer-driven lifestyles most of us now lead. Healthy people aren’t dying from COVID-19, and they won’t be dying from COVID-29 or the next influenza or whatever ancient viruses we unleash next, whether it be from a lab or from the melting glaciers. Trillions of viruses rain down on us from the sky every day. Of course, the vast majority of them cannot affect us. But as we get more and more sickly with our ridiculous modern lifestyles, poor diets, and environmental destruction, we as a species will become more prone to novel viruses and other pathogens coming soon.
If you want to know how to have a strong immune system, fix your diet, fix your gut, exercise, and keep eating well. We’re looking at an economic collapse, the likes of which the world has never seen, and more pandemics along with a host of other environmental calamities are sure to come. Now is the time to fortify yourself.
Economic Recession Will Likely Kill More Children Than Total Coronavirus Death Toll
The pandemic is real, but the puppet masters of the world are using this situation for abhorrent and frightening power grabs, leaving people seemingly helpless to do anything about it while we are told to “shelter in place” as our rights get stripped away. It’s very convenient for those in power, and it’s frightening what they’re getting away with.
We are addressing this pandemic all wrong.
People with compromised immune systems should be taking precautions while the rest of the world builds immunity. The government should be pushing for the population to make healthier, safer lifestyle choices and this should be a huge reminder to us all that both how we take care of our environment and how we talk care of our bodies is paramount. And on that note, as necessary as they may be in some situations, wearing a face mask for long periods of time really isn’t good for you. This whole face-mask obsession could end up causing a lot of illness as well as environmental problems. I’m not recommending wearing face masks. I’m not recommending not to wear them. It’s complicated.
On the other hand, it’s fascinating to see what’s happening, and there’s lots of good news resulting from the way we are “sheltering in place.” The environment is showing signs of remarkable resiliency, people are generally eating much better (restaurant food is really bad for you), homeschooling is the new normal, we’re finally taking a serious look at how we’ve set up “capitalism” and what it means for us in such dire times, and it’s really just a fascinating experiment at a time when we need to look hard at these issues.
But this perspective comes from a place of immense privilege. All across the world business and schools and daycares are closed, incomes have stopped, people are hungry, family members are stuck with abusive family members at such incredibly stressful times, and so much more. The reaction to the pandemic is ruining a lot of lives right now. Even if everything were to get better from today on and just go back to normal, the reverberations would still last a very long time. And this is mostly due to how poorly the U.S. and many other governments are handling the situation.
Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday.”
It’s likely that more people will die from the economic collapse of our financial system than from the virus itself. That’s not to say that the measures taken are pointless. It’s hard to know for sure, but it’s possible that if we had gone about business-as-usual we likely would have endured far more deaths and economic destruction than we’re dealing with now. Also, you never know how seriously a novel pathogen can impact us until it does. So it’s pretty hard to justify lax measures.
The estimate could be low. The risk report included that nearly 369 million children who normally rely on school meals for daily nutrition no longer have this as an option. According to the UN, malnutrition is still the leading cause of death in the world today. The foreseen is being considered, but there’s also going to be a heck of a lot of unforeseen in this very novel, globally-connected situation we’re in now.
The potential losses that may accrue in learning for today’s young generation, and for the development of their human capital, are hard to fathom. More than two-thirds of countries have introduced a national distance learning platform, but among low-income countries, the share is only 30 percent.
We’re radically underestimating the number of coronavirus cases but with that, we’re also radically underestimating the numbers of people who have gotten the virus, recovered, and developed antibodies.
A coronavirus vaccine is not going to work any better than the flu vaccine works, which is to say it will make pharmaceutical companies a lot of money only to damage a lot of people. There are multiple reports of people getting the virus more than once and we now know the virus has mutated at least twice. Whether or not the virus was made in a lab or is a result of environmental destruction, more is sure to come. We need a totally different approach for the economy, the environment, and our health. Allopathic medicine, our profit-driven pharmaceutical system, and our economic system are showing everyone around the world that there needs to be a better way, for our health and the environment.
Under the current system, if I ruled the world, but if I only had a conventional understanding of health, I would implement free healthcare to everyone, a UBI of 80% of everyone’s income up to 100,000 a year, paid weekly via direct deposit or debit card or cash (no restrictions that disproportionately affect poor or minorities).
Small businesses should be able to apply for loans and grants should be available for the ones that are trying to do the work that most needs to be done (like medical and environmental for instance).
Big businesses should be left to file for bankruptcy and have to restructure and get more component CEOs who like to save money for such instances instead of continually relying on government bailouts.
We should be making sure everyone has access to raw, fresh, healthy, organic produce. People should start growing as much of their own food as they can, and the government should be helping to facilitate this as well as helping get the food we currently have to the people who need it.
There should be educational campaigns about how people should take care of themselves.
But none of this would really be necessary if we already knew how to take care of ourselves. The virus is rarely if ever killing healthy people. If it did, it would exhaust it’s host supply too quickly and be far less likely to be an epidemic. Ideally, the immunocompromised would be told to shelter in place, wear masks for short periods of time if they must go out, wash their hands obsessively while out, etc. Grocery stores would know how to reduce transmission and would be disinfecting properly. Then we wouldn’t need an economic shutdown.
We really shouldn’t even worry so much about “germs.” We should be taking better care of ourselves and doing what Sweden is doing to build up herd immunity.
What Am I doing?
My family and I are fortunate, so far, due to the nature of the businesses we are involved in, and the fact that we were already growing our own food and homeschooling our kids.
We have started an urban farm, both to feed us and for the whole neighborhood.
We have to take certain sanitization measures with our businesses, with which we are using a spray of 65% alcohol and 35% industrial strength vinegar. But other than that, we’re doing our normal thing of eating salads and drinking cranberry lemonade every day. We are sure to have on stock Echinacea, Shillington’s Blood Detox, reishi mushroom, and our favorite root cider. If we were to feel a tickle in the through or a snuffy sinus we’d take them all until symptoms are gone, but we haven’t had any such issues. Our gut health is as good as it gets, and this is absolutely paramount when it comes to staying healthy. For more on supplements for coronavirus, click here.
Distilleries Struggling to Make Sanitizer Amidst FDA Regulations
To help combat the lack of essential supplies, many industries have stopped normal production to produce things like masks, ventilators, and hand sanitizer.
Some industries, however, are having a more difficult time than others. Many distilleries have stopped normal production to produce hand sanitizer. However, due to FDA regulations and the lack of supplies, distilleries are not able to get hand sanitizer out to the general public as quickly as they should be able to.
FDA regulations require hand sanitizer to be denatured, to prevent people from drinking it. This is done through additives that make it extremely bitter or otherwise undrinkable. Due to high demand, however, distilleries are having a difficult time obtaining isopropyl alcohol, the most common denaturant.
Locally, we’ve scoured the stores and most of the online sources are back-ordered. We’d be able to get sanitizer out much more quickly if this wasn’t the case.
Additionally, distilled alcohol that is not denatured (generally intended for human consumption) is taxed at a high rate. This means, even if the FDA regulations were removed the potential cost of the hand sanitizer could be much greater than if it was denatured. The $2 trillion stimulus bill signed on March 27th waived the excise tax for alcohol used in sanitizer until January 2021. However, the bill states that manufacturers must follow FDA guidelines that require a denaturant despite the World Health Organization’s recipe that does not require a denaturant.
The Unexpected Environmental Impact of Coronavirus
While much of the human population is inside quarantining, skies are clearing up, water is less polluted, and the Earth is making small recoveries from the damages caused as a result of day to day life. The COVID-19 pandemic could result in one of the greatest drops in carbon emissions in history. The last significant drop in global emissions was in 2009 after the recession and the last drop in emissions of this magnitude was seen at the end of World War 2.
Four billion people worldwide are being told to shelter in their homes, the world economy has stalled, and scientists are anxiously awaiting what could be one of the largest drops in carbon emissions in history.
Some scientists say it’s still too early to expect a significant change while others say we could see an emissions drop of more than 5%. Emissions from transportation make up around 14% of global emissions and in some states, city traffic has decreased by more than 30%. Additionally, air pollution in some of the countries’ most polluted cities, Los Angeles and Seattle have seen a significant drop.
The short-term implications are much easier to see. Many of the behaviors people have given up — like driving to work everyday or taking international flights — are extremely carbon intensive
While the pandemic has some unforeseen environmental benefits, there are also many drawbacks. Due to the large quantities being used, masks and gloves that are not properly disposed of are washing up on ocean shores. Additionally, the EPA and the Trump Administration have made cutbacks to environmental regulations for the time being. Also, planes are still flying even when they’re nearly empty.
35,000+ deaths in U.S., New York Orders Everyone To Wear Face Masks
At the time of the publishing of this article, World Meter reports that 152,318 people have died from COVID-19 around the world, with 34,641 deaths within the United States.
Unlike flu deaths, which are radically over-reported, I suspect that Coronavirus deaths are under-reported. Although, there is evidence to the contrary: The hospitals are eerily quiet, except for Covid-19. Fewer people are being treated for or dying from heart attacks and strokes and many other common diseases that normally fill up the hospitals. An argument many on the political right are making is that hospitals are basically just assuming that everyone has Coronavirus when they may just have cardiovascular disease or even the flu.
Some, including I, suspect the triggers for many of the illnesses that normally fill up the hospitals and inflate the death statistics are not happening as much. For instance, restaurant food is horrible for you! Not to mention the bars. Cooking at home and not working are likely two of the healthiest things people can do for themselves – until the money runs out, of course.
Another argument from the right, and one I think has a lot more validity, is that people who are dying from other diseases who are having CoVID-19 listed as their cause of death would have died regardless. At the very least, most (if not all) of these people who died were very unhealthy.
Like other infectious diseases that are capable of causing a pandemic, CoVID-19 is not likely to cause death in someone who is healthy (we would argue it’s impossible, but that’s speculation for another article). I’m aware of the deaths of people who reportedly seemed healthy, but conventional health standards leave much to be desired.
New York Requires Covering Face In Public
New York is dealing with the nation’s worst coronavirus outbreak. Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday, April 15th that all people must wear a mask or something to cover the face while in public. The executive order is scheduled to take effect after a three-day grace period.
If you are going to be in a situation, in public, where you come into contact with other people in a situation that is not socially distanced, you must have a mask or a cloth covering nose and mouth.
More than a third of the nation’s 600,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 are in New York, according to Johns Hopkins University. Experts say the outbreak appears to be leveling off. Cuomo said the economy won’t be able to make a full comeback until there’s a vaccine, which scientists have said will take up to a year and a half.
With local economy all but shutdown, Cuomo started outlining a gradual reopening of businesses, saying the state is moving toward a “new normal.”
Where we’re going, it’s not a reopening in that we’re going to reopen what was. We’re going to a different place.