Lookin' good! 
Emergency waiting room populations have ballooned across the province, and hospitals are way past capacity in Edmonton, according to the head of the Alberta Medical Association.
“It’s as bad as we’ve seen it in 25 years, that’s how bad it is right now,” president Dr. Paul Parks said Monday. “We’ve never had that many in the Edmonton zone. We are literally activating the AHS disaster plan … we’re trying to get patients to next available beds.”
Last Monday, in the Edmonton zone, Parks said there were 202 admitted very-sick patients with no hospital beds to go to, so they were stuck in emergency.
“We’ve never had that many in the Edmonton zone,” Parks said.
Chart taken from: https://nitter.net/MoriartyLab
“COVID-19 and related hospital closures have exacerbated but are not the cause of Canada’s historic wait times challenges,” said Bacchus Barua, director of the Fraser Institute’s Centre for Health Policy Studies. “Previous results revealed that patients waited an estimated 20.9 weeks for medically necessary elective care in 2019 — long before the pandemic started.”
You know I'm sure these trends towards underfunding public health are bigger than just COVID, but for this paragraph to be the only mention of covid in the whole article is fucking insulting. It seems obvious to me that covid hospitalizations are the acute cause. It's like the same levels of lede burying as that article that said hospitalizations due to "respiratory ilnesses like the flu" were way up, but it was 200 to 1 covid vs flu/other
The Fraser Institute is a far-right think tank, so you can pretty much ignore whatever they say. In this case there's a 99% chance they're just advocating for privatizing healthcare.
it's also just complete propaganda to even include that in there in the first place. The article is about emergency departments in Alberta being overcapacity, while the Fraser report is about medically necessary elective care wait times across Canada. Two completely different things.
It provides a background I guess (although I likely disagree with the Fraser Institute on reasons for the long wait times and solutions) and there are overlaps, but the current crisis in Alberta is clearly an exceptional situation that is different from the normal everyday crisis in healthcare, given that they're enacting part of their "disaster plan." Yet there's no reason given, or questions asked regarding those reasons, for why the current exceptional situation is happening. It's just used to back up the Fraser Institute talking about a completely different issue. Even the title goes
AMA president sounds alarm as Alberta hospital wait times rise
Wait times rise. Not hospitals are overcapacity or anything that might suggest urgency, but wait times are longer.
Aside from Canada clearly being in a major covid wave, Stats Canada just released a study showing 1 out of 9 Canadians had some form of long covid, their data showing that reinfections increase your risk of long covid, and huge amount of health care staff being knocked out of the workforce due to long term illness due to covid over the past three years, but sure... technically it's not just Covid.
Your memory forgets all the lefties, including Biden and Cackling Kamala, saying all sorts of shit before they were "elected".
I guess that's what happens when your provincial government all but declares war on their own public health system during the worst pandemic in a century.
In a couple of instances, there were beds listed as empty and available, but they couldn’t staff them, Parks said.
as usual, management would rather let people die than spend more money paying people
