What Is the Cost of COVID?

It seems that everyone has jumped on the COVID band wagon to discuss the lunacy that we see every day; I truly try to stay away from joining in but I find it difficult when I continue to be immersed in the process.  I have written articles about the military COVID response that I have been part of, but now the craziness continues with a civilian organization.  I will start by saying that this is a very professional and well-run organization, the issues that I want to discuss do not have anything to do with this organization.  Our mission is to manage and staff hospitals that are managing a very high COVID census. The regions we are supporting have been overrun with additional COVID cases and affected patients.  Hospitals have been bombarded with COVID related cases that they can no longer manage with the staff that they normally employ; in fact, I was informed that many of them have left due to the strain of long hours, strenuous workload, and fear of COVID.  These hospitals have requested many medical providers through the state and are being supplemented by these state funds; these hospitals then are being staffed by medical providers that they do not have to pay for. This is only the beginning of the expenditures that are being incurred with this response.

Each of the medical providers and onsite managers come with a very high price tag.  Most of the staff earn several times what they would make working at a “normal” position and since they are required to work a lot of overtime, the paychecks are quite enormous.  Additionally, all the hotels, vehicles, food funds, and electronic equipment are provided to each staff member while they are on the mission.  It has been reported that daily expenditures for the overall mission are more than $15 million dollars per day! This monthly expense equates to nearly half a billion dollars just using simple math.  It has also been reported that my current organization is one of the least expensive contracts for the government to employ.  Continuing with simple math, a yearly price tag would be somewhere in the ballpark of 6 billion dollars.  We are only supporting a very small percentage of the United States – now let us imagine the overall price tag for all the other regions and agencies around the country! 

We are spending an enormous amount of money for a virus that I am not entirely convinced exists in the form that it is reported to exist.  I am also witness to additional lunacy at the hospitals that I help oversee.  All the staff that I see in the hospitals are all wearing masks, eye protection, gloves, and a full-face shield over all of that.  I have even witnessed some of these staff members with their head gear and shoes wrapped with additional protective layers.  Every single person who comes into the hospital is screened for high temperatures and symptoms before being allowed to enter. I watch as staff and visiting patients hyper-sanitize everything from their hands, cellphones, vehicles, and ID cards.   It appears that the hospital staff and clients are treating COVID like a truly dangerous and deadly disease.  Now I can imagine where some of this mentality and protocols come, simply due to a large amount of cases and deaths within these hospitals.  The staff that I manage have reported many COVID related deaths, to the point of not being able to adequately move these bodies out of the hospital.  Several of my nurses have reported having to stack bodies out of the way to make room for new patients. 

Some of the statistics reported have the death rate at 80-90% once a patient with COVID goes on a ventilator.  It seems then that the true death sentence for COVID is being intubated!  Unfortunately, much of this death rate data reported to me is the true mismanagement of patients who are on COVID units.  COVID infected patients seem to be treated much different than a regular patient, and many procedures are withheld simply because of a COVID diagnosis.  In other words, many patients are allowed to just die because the doctors are scared to order procedures that might expose anyone else to COVID.  Physicians are now primarily interacting with the hospital staff through video conference and not truly evaluating their patients in person due to COVID.  Neglect and inappropriate medical care appear to be the main reason for someone on a COVID unit to die. 

I feel like the mindset and attitudes that even our hospital staff have been subject to, have been ingrained in great depth through our media.  Even if you look at this “pandemic” as a true deadly disease, the death rate of less than 1% certainly does not justify the worldwide excessive response.  However, when the death rates began to drop, the number of positive cases took the forefront of the news.  I guess if you cannot scare people with death rates, you must scare them with different data.  I believe that the reason that we have so many new cases are due to the excessive amount of testing that is being done. 

What then is really killing those with COVID?