US Open to Allow Russians to Play (Novak still in question)

[jimlosaltos]

That is the reported numbers I guess.

Yeah. The 8 million dead is an attempt at collating those reported dead from covid worldwide despite disparate record keeping and reporting.

The 15 million is a medical group's attempt at the rather difficult task of estimating the total impact via "excess death counts". So, it would include someone that died from another disease while waiting for a respirator, or died sitting in an over-flowing emergency room for lack of care. Given how extreme the overload in US hospitals was (and still is) I can't imagine what it was like in the third world.

Friend runs a chain of hospitals. His stories about filling the parking lot with tents to do triage during the pandemic peak are chilling. In the middle of it, political protesters circled the Level 1 trauma center with their gun-toting pick-up trucks, blocking ambulances from bringing in the injured. A couple of them just got convicted this week of trying to kidnap and murder the governor there.

People are bored. But Hospital staffs are still reeling. In the county where I live two MDs attempted suicide this summer because of over-work (one succeeded). That's in a high-income area with more hospitals and access to health care than most.

Access to elective surgery is quite difficult. One friend is in the middle of what could be a year wait for a heart valve replacement. Another got covid for the second time. Like his first, it started out quite mild then suddenly turned bad. Now, he's having to postpone life-saving surgery on a heart aneurism since covid makes the surgery potentially deadly.

It's not going away any time soon, I fear.

Sorry for the long digression.