A committee hearing last week revealed how angry the public still is with the health care system’s patient isolation policies during the Covid pandemic, and how the health care system itself would probably do it all over again, if needed.
The House Health and Social Services Committee heard from Alaskans from across the state last week about the horrors of people dying alone during the Covid-19 pandemic, without a loved one to hold their hand. People told their stories of having been prohibited from being with their husbands, grandparents, and children as they died or were on the brink of death in hospitals during the pandemic, when hospitals enacted strict “no-visitor” rules.
Rita Trometter from North Pole describe how, several years ago, her adult-age son came down with a terminal medical condition.
“As parents, we promised him that he would never be alone,” she said. She, her husband, and friends would take turns being with him in the hospital.
“He was with persons he trusted and felt comfortable with 24-7,” Trometter told the committee. “Yes, I slept in his room, even when medical staff made it less than desirable. This is what we do for our family and especially our children.” Having her son not feel alone made all the surgeries, medical procedures, paperwork, and doctor interactions less stressful.
“No matter the age, your child is always your child,” she continued. “During the ‘plandemic,’ those options of making your child or loved ones and oneself feel secure disappeared. The result is that any future government control upon our lives for medical care will diminish the small amount of trust that is left in the field of medicine.”
Kristin Hills of Big Lake described how her grandmother in 2020 was diagnosed with a brain tumor and entered hospice care, “where she was held as a prisoner for five months. She would call home depressed and angry and scared and alone, and she wanted her family there with her … She had no one.” The family had always promised her she would not die alone, but their hands were tied.
The idea that isolating her grandmother would prevent her from getting Covid didn’t work, Hills said, because the staff brought the virus in and she was infected with it anyway.
“Family couldn’t kill her, but staff could kill her. My grandmother died with no one being able to go and sit with her … She ended up saying goodbye to her family on a Zoom call. She died in the night and we now live with pain knowing we could not give grandma her last wish — not dying alone.”
Hills also described how a family member who is mentally disabled, with the intellectual ability of a five-year-old, was diagnosed with Covid and ended up so dehydrated that he needed to be hospitalized. He was in MatSu Regional Hospital for six days without his family being able to be with him.
“I am appalled that we are even discussing in a free society whether or not we can sit with our loved ones when they are sick or when they are dying,” Hills said. “This is the exact same thing that happened in Nazi Germany and yet here we are allowing the same thing to happen in our country.”
Others called into the committee with similar stories of their loved ones dying alone in the hospital — and not necessarily dying from Covid but being kept in isolation from family due to the contagious disease that had caused hospitals to enact their strictest policies.
HB 52 is sponsored by Rep. Sarah Vance of Homer with cosponsors Rep. Kevin McCabe of Big Lake and Rep. Ben Carpenter of Nikiski. Vance brought a similar measure to the House in 2021, when she introduced it as an amendment into a telehealth bill during a special session. Her amendment was supported by the majority of the members. But then it got tangled in politics and the bill was tabled a the request of the hospital association.
Bernadette Wilson, state director of Americans for Prosperity Alaska, reminded the committee of Marvin Abbott, who spent a month camped on the lawn at Providence Alaska Medical Center, while his medically fragile daughter was alone in side in critical care for asthma. Several others from Anchorage joined the Kodiak man in his protest on the lawn of the no-visitor policy during the Covid pandemic.
But Rep. Zack Fields, a Democrat from Anchorage who appears to favor the hospital no-visitor policy, challenged Wilson by asking her why Americans for Prosperity was advocating for more regulations on hospitals. Wilson responded that AFP has always been pro-freedom and pro-family, and that she would be happy to sit down with him and go over the group’s priorities and how the group’s support for HB 52 fits within the concept of personal freedom.
Rep. Dan Saddler asked Jared Kosin, who runs the Alaska Hospital and Health Care Association trade group, if the hospitals intended to apologize to people who were torn from their families because of the no-visitor policies.
“You said there was no change in visitation policies, but there was implementation of existing policies that had rarely been implemented. In other words, this was not new policy, this was just extremities, which resulted in the denials of visitation,” said Rep. Saddler.
“Visitation had never been restricted to this degree, never, that we know of, in our lifetimes,” Kosin said over the phone to the committee. “And so pre-Covid and through covid, the written policies around visitation did not change. The policies and the way they were written were used accordingly, based on the situation.”
The policies contemplated clinical situations where visitation would need to be restricted, Kosin said. “It’s got to be reasonable judgment, it’s up to the clinical team, basically. What I’m saying is, those policies never changed during covid, those medical teams exercised those policies as written.”
Rep. Saddler was not quite satisfied.
“Mr. Kosin, I did hear a bit of a mea culpa in your comments. You said, you did acknowledge the horrific situations that came about, and I think I also hear you saying that should there be another pandemic of a high-infectious disease in the future, that the same policies that allowed the visitation limitations in the past would be applied in the future. So I’m going to offer you this opportunity. Is there any way that you think the health care industry might implement those policies differently should we have another pandemic?” Saddler asked Kosin.
“The problem is we’re all trying to predict what a future pandemic may be,” Kosin responded. “We have no idea what it will be. We have no idea if it’s something that’s going to target adolescents, we have no idea if it’s going to be something that goes back to The Plague in Medieval times.” The policy allows hospitals to deal with circumstances that are, as of now, unknown. There are situations that call for clinical judgment where visitor limitations “may be necessary,” he said.
Later in the hearing, Saddler tried again with Kosin, “Without exposing your association or any health care practitioner to liability, we seem to have a conflict here between humanity and epidemiology. Is there any way the health care industry might express an apology to the families of people whose loved ones died alone?
Kosin disagreed: “I’d be the first person to say we’re all sorry for anyone who has to experience a situation where you can’t have loved ones come and visit … But we’re all human beings, and we all went through something, and saw things in very different ways, and I guess I would have you pose your question to nurses, doctors, support staff who were at the hospital, who had friends die, who saw trauma … and ask them for the same apology.”
Kosin ended up dominating the hearing, and several Alaskans were not able to be heard.
Jennifer Kadake of Kake testified on behalf of people living in rural Southeast Alaska and had a non-Covid story that illustrated the problem from a different angle — that of informed consent and the need for patients to have their own advocates with them. She described how she was involved in a vehicle accident in which, while her wounds were severe, her vital signs were stable and she was coherent.
“If I had had the ability to have with me a support person of my choice during my medical treatment, a very painful experience that continues to actually give me nightmares, would have been absolutely avoided,” she said. “If I had the right to have a support person of my choice with me, my support person would have informed the medical providers that they were treating someone with a background in the medical field, trained to perform emergency medical intervention, like an intraosseous infusion, also known as an ‘I.O.'”
During her emergency treatment at her home village health center, the medical provider could not get intravenous access, resulting in the choice to proceed with the excruciating I.O. She said that because she had no support person with her, she was forcefully restrained by the local volunteer emergency care team and given the painful procedure, which involves gouging a needle into the bone until it reaches the marrow.
“If I had had the right to have a support person of my choice with me, my begging and screaming refusing the I.O. procedure would not have been ignored,” she said. The medical provider missed the first attempt and the painful procedure was reattempted. “That was about the time I passed out from pain.”
Kadake said that informed consent is not being practiced, and that patients need an advocate with them, if possible. She pointed out that for small communities like hers, patients are not told of their rights to a support person of their choice at rural emergency medical facilities, “much less information given to the patient of their patient rights at all.” She said the people in Alaska seeking medical treatment in any capacity have the right for support.
Others who testified in favor of HB 52 included Barbara Tyndall of North Pole, former Rep. Chris Tuck of Anchorage, Larisa Fonov of Wasilla, Kelli Toth of Chugiak, Alison Libby of Anchorage, Connie Graff of Anchorage, Peggy Rotan of Anchorage, and Evelyn Dutton of Anchorage.
One of the many casualties of Covid was trust in healthcare.
Too many doctors and nurses acted if they were the elite and we exist to fund their lives. Go away plebes and know we’re better than you.
The concepts of first do no harm and patients being a part of the treatment process was destroyed forever.
I especially got tired of hearing how heroic they were for showing up to work. If they were terrified of germs, get the hell out of healthcare. You picked the profession.
Also it’s worth noting, Zack Fields is a useless human being.
MA: they DO know more than us plebes. That’s a good thing. But you will allow your politics to trump medical science.
I will? Like you know me?
Bleat on, sheep.
Your posts are quite frequent here MA. We all get to learn something about you. Like I said, you’ll put politics over science. Ami wrong?
Profoundly. But you’re a liberal so I expect it from.
You appear (time will tell) to be in the category of not knowing how much you don’t know. And not caring.
But you do you.
But you as much said it. Many many healthcare officials died during covid running into the firefight battle. I for one am thankful that they took their oath seriously and ran into that burning building to try to save us.
If you think someone is better or smarter than you just because of a profession or a degree, you are truly a sad person to be pitied.
No one can be made to feel inferior without their consent. Stop consenting.
Need to stop you right there Mask. If you had a brain tumor, I’m pretty sure you don’t want me whacking around in there but rather want someone who’s educated in doing such a thing. Pretty sure that’s all he meant.
You’re smarter than this. Don’t engage in whatabboutism because I didn’t list a specific example close to your heart.
Of course many practitioners know things we don’t. But they are not infallible and frequently make mistakes.
I also know how many medical schools are ditching entrance requirements pursuing “diversity” over quality. Meaning that little aspect of life is bound to get worse, not better.
My issue is the deification that very arrogant part of society is demanding for just doing their jobs. The poster in question is a class A example of same.
Blaine, you are wrong in your implication.
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Health care professionals may know more than the average person about health care, but it is NOT their place to politicize health care, which is what many of them did during the Wuhan Virus panicdemic.
Jeff, all they were doing was trying to save lives by slowing or stopping the spread of the virus. It was an unfortunate time for many. Monday morning quarterbacking is popular after the game has been played.
Acknowledging they were wrong keeping people from dying relatives is a good start to getting the public back on their side.
Pulling their collective heads out of their butts is a good second step.
It’s one thing to make a mistake. It happens. It’s a whole ‘nother to double down on it, deny you made it, and get outraged when called on it.
Anchorage healthcare, as much of the rest of the nation, has not done that.
Doesn’t matter if they know more or not. The ultimate decisions are made by the patient and their families. If a patient decides to start or stop a treatment, that choice cannot be over ruled by a doctor. The extension of this is whether a patient can have family with them during treatment. This is even more important if the patient is looking at death.
“If a patient decides to start or stop a treatment, that choice cannot be over ruled by a doctor”
I think you mean *shouldn’t be*
Those decisions are overruled quite regularly, even up to the point of medical kidnapping.
Prior to the ‘pandemic’ give me an example of your medical kidnapping. I’ve had family members just tell their doctor ‘goodbye’ and leave the hospital. No one forced them to stay.
Paul in the Valley:
I’m sorry I cannot provide links to particular cases. You could search the term if you were interested.
Generally it refers to parents who sought medical care for their children and subsequently had the children taken by authorities due to spurious allegations of abuse. It can also refer to instances where parents disagree with a diagnosis or treatment plan, and the state takes custody of the child in order to force that treatment.
Regarding your comment, an adult patient might be able to leave hospital, but if a parent removed their child AMA there is a very high probability that CPS would follow up and force re-admission.
I don’t know off hand any cases of this happening with vulnerable adults, but it wouldn’t shock me.
Brings back back memories of when my father was dying. he was in the hospital, nothing to do with covid but cancer. Depending on who was on shift at the hospital, I could stay with him. I would have to leave from time to time to eat and sleep and was turned away upon my arrival back at the hospital twice to leave my father all alone. I would return later to find a different shift crew who got to know me and did not have any problem with letting me stay with him. Sometimes driving to a close by store to eat and then sleeping very little in the car in winter to avoid the driving conditions in the winter amongst other things that were occurring at his home while i was not there. The saddest part being his wife absolutely paranoid of this covid thing even though we all had our “rabies” shots would not go to the hospital. Eventually overcoming her fear due to Matt, an in-law of mine who had quite an influence on her mind as she suffers from dementia to top it all of. She did come by to the hospital occasionally yet her fears returned. My father eventually was released from the hospital to go home to die. Amidst all this there was a lot of evilness and backstabbing and the mayhem that occurred, during and after all this. But I can’t talk about that. I can only write, which I did a lot of during this ordeal.
There’s people who would argue that jumping off a cliff is a great idea. You can’t fix arrogance nor stupidity, much the same. What can be done is to ensure that we have the right to make our own decisions.
Exactly. I wholeheartedly agree. I’m not sure it’s a smart idea though, to put healthy people in a situation when they are extremely emotional, and infect them with the same affliction that’s killing their loved ones. That almost seems kind of cruel. Now if everyone is on board, and they say I don’t care if I get the disease and die just like my relative, I want to be in there holding his hand. I want to do that if and when it kills me. Then of course make them sign a release so that they can’t come back on the hospital and sue them for putting them in a situation that was dangerous. Do all that and then I say yeah go for it
“One of the many casualties of Covid was trust in healthcare.”
Trust in healthcare, education, police, military, media and all government was truly lost many years ago for most. When America was fairly unified in morals and most families were intact (say, 1980) you could kinda trust some institutions (ok, not the media at all, ever). But that was a very long time ago. Today, there is no real rule of law it’s every man for himself. Each individual must provide for their own needs and avoid all institutions.
But hospitals in particular are very, very dangerous institutions, period. Most of medicine is a scam designed to fleece you, not help you. Plus, hospitals occasionally make you sick and can even kill you, while taking your money and even property in the process. There is no free market in medicine.
It is wise to eat right, stay fit, and work very hard to stay healthy enough so as to never enter a hospital except for the most basic care. Everyone dies, but when my time comes I will try very hard to die at home and not enter a hospital for the final act. Is another day or week struggling to keep alive with abnormal medical care really worth it?
My doctor when I was a young man told me: “nothing I do is good for you. But it is often better for you than what brought you here”.
He was a big believer in knowledgeable patients and everything in moderation. Including health care. He only prescribed antibiotics in cases of sustaining or aggressive illness. And only to help the body do its own work. He also was a believer in quality of life over quantity of life.
Clearly there are things some medical professionals can do for us we can’t do ourselves. Surgery, oncology, renal issues come to mind. Time and place for everything.
I’ve lost family members to hospitalization. Went in doing fair, came out dead. Picked up infections they couldn’t fight off while hospitalized. Don’t blame the hospital, these things happen. But to take the air or intellectual and moral superiority many of them take is offensive.
It’s my fear my last days will be spent on a cold, emotionally sterilized room instead of at home with the things and people important to me.
It sounds like your doctor was philosophizing and almost contradicting himself. If he was treating you and you were getting better then it was good for you. I have a relative that went in for a simple surgery and came out with a staph infection and had to go back in and get it cleaned out and put on a vacuum pump and then 3 months later do the surgery all over again. Some hospitals are worse than others about having non killable staff.
Hospice is the best way to cash out.
Health care and hospitals are trash. Ruined by politics.
Agree with my take or not, most of us can agree Zack Fields is a rancid individual.
IMO Anchorage owes us (Juneau) some sort of reparations for having to host and endure him nearly 1/2 the year.
This draconian rule never made any sense to me.
Part of the hospital accreditation process through the joint commission requires rigorous infection control protocols. Hospitals and clinics are the very place, to be prepared and equipped to deal with infection of any kind.
Instead of limiting visitors to one or two family members or the patient’s designated advocate and providing them with PPEs, just like staff, family was locked out, patients were isolated and left without a voice to communicate their wishes to medical staff/administrators. It would have been one thing, if the hospitals kept all staff/administrators at the facility and housed and fed them there, but instead they came and went, bringing all sorts of pathogens with them each and every time. So all this supposed lowering of infection risk was mute by the very nature of staff shift changes.
Yeah, keep them locked up at their jobs, treat them as disposable. That’s the ticket.
You are disposable. All of us are.
The fact you think otherwise speaks volumes towards the attitudes people are so sick of.
What’s coming you didn’t just bring down on yourselves. You went out of the way to court it.
There have always been isolation units. It was more common during the tuberculosis years.
Greg, even in an isolation/infectious disease ward, a positive pressure room or when a patient has a bone marrow transplant and is vulnerable to infection, VISITORS ARE STILL ALLOWED!!!
Like I said earlier, all they were trying to do was stop or slow down the transmission of the disease. In their case, the good of the many outweigh the good of the one or the few.
May I remind you that Mr. Spock volunteered! There was nothing voluntary about isolating patients and again I repeat arbitrarily restricting some groups and not others, made no sense and had really no effect. So the suffering inflicted was simply just cruel.
Greg, you were trying badly, ineffectively, immorally and unethically to assuage your irrational and exaggerated fears induced and instilled in you by a criminal and sociopathic ruling class. Your lack of ANY kind of critical thinking regarding the Wuhan Virus and the so-called “pandemic” is clearly evident, and you have NEVER admitted to having fallen prey to the wild and extreme propaganda and fearmongering surrounding a very mild virus.
Tucker, thank you for making my point. Hospitals purportedly acted as if their goal was to maintain a “closed system”, by keeping ALL visitors out. Yet at the same time, staff and administration personnel would come and go. These individuals were all around the community in their off-time, shopping, going to Palmer or Wasilla to have lunch with friends in a real sit-down indoor normal restaurant etc. catching whatever floated about and bringing it back. This clearly invalidates ANY pretense of a “close system”. There was no reason to keep out visitors, as they could have been afforded the same material as the staff receive in PPEs to mitigate transmission. Furthermore hospitals regularly sanitize most surfaces as a routine, to keep hospital acquired germs like staph aureus or MERSA at bay, which will kill or reduce other pathogens as well.
Keeping family away from the patient violated the patient’s rights and was truly cruel.
It is my impression that banning family and patient advocates had more to do with removing a patient’s ability to direct treatment or demand medications as a last resort, that were disputed by certain national personalities.
Of course hospitals are against this Bill. The industrialized healthcare industry treats its customers as profit units – no more, no less!
HB52 sounds to me like more government interference in private enterprise. I am completely opposed to it.
Lots of poorly informed science illiterate opinions here. The reason that we lost over a million American lives was ignorance…. And plain stupidity. Imagine access to Covid(infectious) dying patients by family…..
Marco, if you are suggesting that the USA had more than one million dead directly due to the Wuhan Virus, that is a flat-out lie, which even the CDC’s own data refutes. Aside from the fact that essentially ALL of those deaths were attributed to the Wuhan Virus via the scientifically invalid PCR ‘test’ — which was not and is not a diagnostically valid test procedure, as its own inventor strenuously argued, and which grossly inflates the actual number of true cases being tested for — but the CDC’s own quietly-disseminated, and corporate media-ignored data, indicates that not more than 6% of all the deaths commonly attributed to the Wuhan Virus in the USA were in fact directly a result of said infection.
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You are simply spouting establishment propaganda and lies. Stop it already.
Then there was the warden at a prison near us that died from covid complications. He was dead in less than a week.
Your anecdote is meaningless, Greg. But I suppose that statistical analysis and thinking are just as foreign to you as critical thinking apparently is.
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TURN OFF YOUR DAMNED TV ALREADY! And stop being such a gullible and ignorant Boomer fool!
Imagine access to Covid(infectious) dying patients by doctors, nurse’s, or medical staff. Then leaving work after their long shift and going home to their family’s. Then those same family members going to work and school the next day. But I do believe in science, so there is that…
All of us faced the same risk.
Which, it must be reiterated, was very low, and on par with the risk of any bad flu season.
They didn’t stack bodies up like cordwood in semis in a flu season. Jeff needs to stop downplaying it.
Greg, that is absurd BS and a flat-out lie, and you know it.
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Damn, did you fall hook, line and sinker for the corporate media fearmongering and propaganda! Turn off the damned TV already, Greg! It is poisoning your mind!
Hey Albert. You understand that anyone working in an infectious disease setting has rules to follow about cleaning up before leaving the ward, don’t you? They don’t just drop the ‘doctor jacket’ and jump in the car.
Marco – Imagine Gov. Cuomo of New York directing nursing homes to accept Covid infected, elderly hospital patients! You are right about the stupidity, though. They are called Covidiots and they still believe the “vaccines” are safe, still wear a facemask and still believe that the Wuhan China Covid 19 virus came from a penquilin at an outdoor market!
It’s hilarious that you think hospitals are a “private enterprise.” How quaint.
Since you folks posting so far think healthcare people are trash and you’ve lost faith in them I guess none of you go see a doctor or a loved one in a long term care facility. I’m sure you all take care of your sick and infirm relatives at home. Right, that’s what I thought.
Maybe you should have some compassion for those of us who went to work every single day of the pandemic. You really wanted us, all of us including support staff like housekeeping, food service or maintenance staff to be put at even MORE risk by allowing more people to come and go? Keep that thinking up and when there aren’t any more people willing to put their health at risk you can whine about that.
Your irrational, establishment-induced blind panic and paranoia do not trump my freedom, nor anyone else’s freedom.
Your freedom at the cost of others health? Maybe not so much more regulation, but lots more self-control and compassion for others.
Yes, Gregory. Freedom trumps (perceived) safety every time, logically and morally.
Jeff are you saying that all those people didn’t die? Even Trump was saying they were dying like crazy. They died like crazy around here. That Warden was 52 years old and healthy and had a family with four kids. There was the little girl over in Jacksonville that died she was 7 years old. Those are just a couple of isolated cases but I think all that semi stuck car packing corpses stuff was going on up in New York could be wrong. What about all those nursing home people that died? Sure they was going to die anyway but this kind of helped it along. I don’t understand why a lot of you folks act like it never happened or play it down saying it was just another flu season nothing to see here. Did the whole world go crazy when millions died but they didn’t really die they were just trying to put on a big hoax? All for the new world order to get control as some insane theorists claim? It happened. Lots of people died. It was a bad one. There’s worse ones that are coming. Maybe we can’t do anything about it other than just to accept our fate. Some say there is a cleansing going on in the world. It’s easier than the great flood
Calm down, tucker. You can’t speak for other employees who have different opinions about the question.
Just like you rarely speak for other so-called Christians.
Actually, yes. If you are too scared to do your job, get out. Some diversity hire will be happy to replace you.
You chose a job where germs and exposure to nasty things are baked in to the environment. Past time to act like an adult and accept choices have consequences.
I have the same level of compassion for health care workers as you did for people dying alone and scared during Covid.
Actually, in my family we do care for our elderly and infirm at home. Careful about making blanket statements you can’t possibly know.
Typical liberal.
BTW: most of us would have loved to be able to go to work every day during Covid. I wonder if some of your attitude stems from you had to.
You lost respect and support the instant you choose government over the general public. OTOH, it is clear to one and all that you now believe government is your customer rather than your patients and their families. Your support for all the idiotic COVID mandates – lockdowns, shuttering the schools, vax, social distancing, war on therapeutics, masking, etc, none of which are based in anything other than do this because we said so from the CDC. Now you deign to be shocked, simply shocked that nobody believes you anymore. You sir, or madam, your profession, and the entire public health apparat made a choice. And chose poorly. You’re really not going to enjoy playing under your new rules. Cheers –
Wow!
Frankly, working in health care was YOUR choice. I am grateful that you decide to go to work everyday, but a lot of other people did too and they are not expecting any credit or laurels.
Family and visitors are crucial to a better patient outcome. You clearly give the impression that you feel you are more important than your patients’ mental health and comfort and that makes me so very sad. A patient being treated without respect for their needs and opinions, impacts the trust they have in their healthcare team and the choices they are present with.
As for your assertion that we “hate” healthcare workers here at MRAK it is a cop-out to dismiss any criticism. Back in the day, all knew the risks, yet nobody whined about it. It was up to nurses to protect themselves and their patients from spreading malicious germs by using the tools (masks, gowns, glove, handwashing etc.), and teaching visitors the proper use of such items. To expect that visitors be excluded to protect you from pathogens, is antithetical to the very concept of caring for the sick and dying.
My mom cries every time she think of her husband of 65 years being left alone and she couldn’t get in to see him before he passed. A lot of guilt there for remaining love one and we are thankful for nurses and doctors but they do need to figure out something different for family members.
According to some on here, he didn’t die from covid and he didn’t die with covid. He just got sick like we all do. No big deal. Now of course if you know me that’s not the way I think. I’m a compassionate person and I care about people. I think it’s real sad that he couldn’t have visitors. I think precautions could have been in place that could have allowed limited visitation. Maybe take the same precautions that people take when they treat the afflicted. I don’t know I’m not a professional virologist. At the time though they didn’t know if this was a planet killer or not. It sure killed the hell out of people though that’s for sure as you know.
And your irrational hate of healthcare workers does not give you the right put me at additional risk in my workplace. I have the right to be as safe as possible in my workplace, just like the rest of you. You don’t get to put me and hospital staff at risk. You don’t get to infringe our freedom to be able to our jobs in a safe work environment. You don’t get to take our rights away.
This legislation not an attack on you nor any healthcare employees.
You have no right to be safe in your workplace. You have a right to be as safe as normal working conditions allow. Nowhere near the same thing.
But I do appreciate you doing an excellent job of proving my initial point.
There are inherent risks in every job. Don’t like them? Find a new job with a safe space and crayons.
First of all Tucker, Thank you to what you do for patients. I doubt anyone wants to take your rights away. Health care has changed so much in the past 50 years. Hospital beds have shrunk, although populations have grown. What I have seen is for patients, in, out and home as quickly as possible.Nurses are tied to computers and sometimes this leaves little time for patient care with staff shortages. If hospitals administrators wanted to accommodate the general public who have loved ones dying , it could be done easily. Set up a protocol and teach family members the how to use gowns and masks properly. Just having a loved one at the bedside of dying patient relieves the staff and all concerned. No one wants to take your rights away, but neither do hospitals have the right to take away the right of being close to a dying relative.
That’s always been their argument though Tucker. I don’t care if I make a hundred people sick, I’m going down and getting me a cheeseburger. I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care it’s all about me. Unfortunately there’s people like that walking around these days. Thank you for your service though.
That is the nature of a free society. Life is a risk. I can choose not to go get a burger if I don’t care for the potential risk.
I prefer this to China where people were boarded up in their homes by the government.
You do you. Me, I’ll err on the side of as much freedom of choice (and acceptance of responsibility) as individuals wish to assume.
Guess I just care about people.
No, Greg, you were selfish, and put catering to your own unjustified and wildly exaggerated fears over the lives and livelihoods of EVERYONE else.
You guys have no problem taking our rights away. Now you complain about pushback. Enjoy playing under your new rules. Cheers –
Bareback
This is only the start of it. Women have been deceived into believing they should not be having babies and raising families in a home while their husbands pursue careers. Rather, they have bought the lie they should be competing with men in the career market place. The result is a disaster for women… who live 7-years longer than men on average. Millions of them will be growing old and dying without children to care for (or about) them. In Japan and Canada, this trend is accelerating dramatically. In Canada, assisted suicide is one of the fastest-growing industries as elderly women seek relief from loneliness.
The way hospitals treated patients and their family during covid was criminal. You had NO say in how they were treated or the method of treatment. There was NO early treatment that was proven to save lives but it didn’t fit the covid narrative nor allow for the hospitals to get Cares Act monies. Death was very profitable for the hospitals. Remdesivir, which was a repurposed drug that had been developed for ebola patients proved to be a complete failure for them when 50% of the patients died from it because of renal failure. So it was then used on covid patients. Liberal use of blood thinners is another thing that was used that caused severe internal bleeds in the patients. I know of one case where 3 different blood thinners were used, Lovenox, being used the most, contributed to the death of the patient. Then there was the high flow oxygen and intubation. Patients who lived through this did so in spite of the dark ages treatment not because of it.
Allopathic medicine has earned the distrust of the masses. Never again should they have such dictatorial powers and those that pushed this treatment should be prosecuted and jailed.
Thank you Rep. Vance for working on this bill, and hope it gets the support it deserves. As far as I am concerned, anyone who votes against it is serving the industry, not the public. What we just witnessed the last 3 years was an outrage and I know with all certainty justice will be served someday to those responsible. What our family experienced first hand and saw with our own eyes told me all I will ever need to know. We once trusted these institutions but no more. This once sacred trust was not only broken, it was destroyed. The government’s protocol was a crime against humanity, and more people are waking up to the fact the Medical Industrial Complex along with the pharma industry was complacent, if not, well, never mind….
Well said, FatAlbert!
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Indeed, the industrial-medical complex, along with the corporate-controlled media and the federal government itself, has destroyed their own credibility, and all of them now have little or no legitimacy.
Jeff, I do care about people and have you gotten sick over this thing, I would have felt terrible for you and your family. If you were a goner, I wouldn’t want your family to get sick either and possibly kick the bucket. Yes I was afraid about getting sick and in the end I did and it came close to killing me. My fears were justified. Down here in Florida, with our elderly population, you would have thought we were walking in downtown Peking 5 years ago with all the masks being worn. Sanitizers everywhere even out on the gasoline pumps at the gas station. Everybody was trying to do all they could to slow this thing down. That’s what the school districts did in Alaska when they close school. They didn’t know if it was going to kill all the kids, and if not, the kids were going to take it home and kill off their elderly grandparents. I had some dust masks left over in my shop that were N95s and I got on the radio and had everybody come out to the end of their driveway and I passed them out to the entire village so that they could attend a funeral. People did all they could, all they they could think about doing to try to help others. I’m not going to stand here and allow you to berate our attempts at compassion and being a human. If what you type on here is truly how your world is, then as a compassionate person, I truly feel sorry for you. I don’t offer that freely, but in your case, I really hope the best for you.
It’s been fascinating to watch the strident defenders of the healthcare status quo prove my point regarding their arrogance.
One in particular has done an outstanding job in providing my point.
Said arrogance has done more to undermine public trust in medicine than anything I’ve seen in my many decades on this earth.
The irony is this arrogance will set back the cause and quality of healthcare for a generation.
Beware of flying too close to the sun Icarus.
Those of you who went to school before the 80s will get the reference.
His problem was, his wings were made of wax. Have they been made of a non-flammable material, perhaps his demise would have been postponed. Not trusting the healthcare system it’s just another knee jerk response from people already not trusting of the government or any institution where decisions are made for people. Some people don’t want a society, or capitalism or any other thing that is socialism in nature, that is meant to help the whole group. Many people accept their PFD and complain why it isn’t any bigger. Very few send it back. Hypocrisy is a two-way street.
Wanna bet where dunleavy lines up on this subject? Like everything else, not my job!
Sleep well folks
The entire Covid fiasco has scarred our collective souls, with rules and mandates that had no basis in logic or science. Liquor stores and pot shops could stay open, but not your gift shop. Big box stores got a monopoly while the small stores selling similar wares were shut down. Close the bars and restaurants, just not the ones at the airport. Get the jab or lose your job, even if you were a health care or public safety professional. Close the schools because the teacher’s union says so, even though kids were and are the lowest risk group. Report all hospital deaths as Covid, score that big government payout. Let hundreds of thousands of illegals stream across our border, untested and without “vaccinations”, and ship them all over the country. The madness of 2020 must never be repeated, but those who rule by fear are still in power. I have spent many weeks in the hospital over the last 18 months and endured a dozen surgeries and if my wife had not been able to be with me, I don’t know if I would be writing this today. This legislation is about humanity, which we need more than ever.
You were doing pretty good until you said close to schools because the kids are the lowest risk group. What’s your simple closed mind failed you to realize is that those kids while maybe carriers, still take the virus home to Mom Dad and their grandparents. That’s what the concern was and it wasn’t about the unions but it was pretty slick of the way you tried to slip that in there like usual. Closing the school came from the top, from the commissioner on down to the superintendents. Thank you for playing though.
Greg, you assume a set of facts that were never in evidence:
1) Every person getting in contact with Covid will have serious health issues
2) Lock-downs prevented the spread of the virus
3) Masks and vaccines will safe us all.
It was clear very early on that kids were not vectors in the spread of this virus. The Europeans realized that and their kids went to actual school throughout most of the pandemic.
The vast majority of individuals did very well, when encountering the virus. The lock-downs actually inhibited the rapid curbing of this disease, as healthy people were not able to create natural immunity in sufficient numbers to significantly slow the down the spread. That’s just immunology 101, despite what the good doctor Fauci peddled. It is significant to note that different areas here in AK had about the same infection rate whether or not they were masked, locked-down or open.
You admonish people for supposedly being callous for wanting to be out and about. This leads me to believe that you stayed home. Evidently you clearly had no compassion for all those individuals, who enabled you to stay home, like the grocery clerks, cooks, truck drivers and delivery persons to name a few. Following your logic, how dare you put them at risk!!
Greg, life is a series of risk assessments. For the government to arbitrarily suspend an individuals ability to make a living, interfere in their family and prevent them from conduct their lives as they see fit, is unconscionable and counter to our American philosophy of individual freedom. If instead all mandates would have remained recommendations each individual would have had the choice to live with the risk they are willing to tolerate and allow their neighbor to do the same.
So in the end I am with Mayor Dan!
Jurisdictions that did not shut down schools showed no correlation between the kids who went to school and a spread of the virus to “Mom, Dad and their grandparents” as you suggest. Just the facts.
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