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Originally posted by Steve Miller:
I wonder how much of this is being driven by insurance companies.

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Delta Air Lines is raising health insurance premiums for unvaccinated employees by $200 a month to cover higher Covid costs

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Originally posted by wtg:

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Originally posted by Steve Miller:
I wonder how much of this is being driven by insurance companies.

Delta's new policy:

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Delta Air Lines is raising health insurance premiums for unvaccinated employees by $200 a month to cover higher Covid costs

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/2...t-covid-vaccine.html

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Originally posted by AdagioM:

He didn’t call it the DELTA variant…

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Nitesh N. Paryani is a radiation oncologist in Tampa and medical director of Tampa Oncology & Proton.

The unvaccinated are killing people in ways they probably never imagined.

As the delta variant spreads, hospitals in Florida, Alabama and other states have been filling with covid patients, almost all of them people who chose not to get vaccinated. As daily infections break records, intensive-care unit beds are scarce or nonexistent.

But the surge has also affected non-covid patients, such as the Texas shooting victim who had to wait more than a week for surgery. Louisiana stroke victims who can’t get admitted to hospitals. And the cancer patient I recently had to turn away.

On Aug. 3, I received a call from a hospital that does not have a cancer program. Such calls are routine at the regional referral center where I work. A doctor at the outlying hospital had a patient with metastatic brain cancer. She was unable to walk, and without urgent radiation treatments there was no hope for any meaningful recovery.

Typically, I would authorize a transfer and start that patient’s treatment the same day. But conditions are no longer typical.

My hospital, one of the largest in central Florida, was full of covid patients, more than 90 percent of whom were unvaccinated. We had no beds available. We had paused elective surgeries the previous week and have been trying to control the influx of patients. Our emergency department had a 12-hour wait that day.

This was an emergency, but I had no resources to help. When I started my oncology practice, and even before I became a physician, I intended to honor the principle my grandfather had set when he began practicing in the 1950s — one that our family had upheld over six decades of caring for people with cancer: Never turn away a patient, regardless of their ability to pay or other circumstances.

But I had no choice. For the first time in my career, I had to say no.

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South Dakota has seen a sharp increase in daily COVID-19 cases following the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in Meade County this month. Hundreds of thousands of bikers descended upon the area August 6-15, despite the Delta variant wreaking havoc on the U.S.

On August 4, the date closest to the start of the rally for which data was available, the state reported 657 active cases. On August 25, the state reported 3,655 active cases. That's a 456% increase of active cases from before the start of the rally to two weeks after, according to the state's department of health.

As of August 24, about two weeks from the start of the event, South Dakota saw a weekly positivity rate of 38.8%. The week leading up to the rally — July 30 to August 6 — the state's weekly positivity rate was much lower, at 10.38%, the department of health data shows. The week before that, July 23-30, the positivity rate was just 6.10%.

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Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
Triage. It's not uncommon in instances of mass casualty.

My triage would be simple: those who did what they could and got sick without anyway get priority over those who refused to take steps to protect their own health.

Yeah, that's a slippery slope. Yeah, that could apply to a lot more than just vaccines.

Don't care. That's my line. I would refuse to give a bed to a COVID patient who was unvaccinated over someone who had metastatic brain cancer. Not a tough call for me.

And I might (laws and ethics aside, purely as a moral thought process) think that it was appropriate to maintain some flex and leave some beds empty for the blameless, rather than fill every last damn one with unvaccinated COVID patients.

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The U.S. government said on Friday it had confirmed the world's first cases of COVID-19 in deer, expanding the list of animals known to have tested positive for the disease.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported infections of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in wild white-tailed deer in the state of Ohio, according to a statement. There were no reports of deer showing symptoms of infection, the USDA said.

"We do not know how the deer were exposed to SARS-CoV-2," USDA spokeswoman Lyndsay Cole wrote in an e-mail to Reuters. "It’s possible they were exposed through people, the environment, other deer, or another animal species."

The USDA has previously reported COVID-19 in animals including dogs, cats, tigers, lions, snow leopards, otters, gorillas and minks.

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Here is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the findings and that have yet to be certified by peer review.