i've learned more about the real on-the-ground ugliness of COVID from r/nursing than I've learned from any other source. Even the most unflinching media portrayals of what COVID does to the unvaccinated and the people who have to care for them leaves a lot out.
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for example last week i learned that a lot of nurses have had to deal with maggots in the intubated bodies of COVID patients, because anybody who has to be intubated for as long as many COVID patients do makes an attractive home for fly larvae, even when they're still alive
My SO is an ICU nurse and she had to transition to a part-time position to keep herself from having a mental breakdown. She mostly keeps the gory details to herself, but I've heard so many stories of Zoom call "last goodbyes" that I know how bad it is.
Basically with Delta, if you have to go into the ICU, you're 99.5% going to die. And these are people in their 30s and 40s who are healthy with the exception of maybe one comorbidity. But they are ALL unvaccinated. They haven't seen a vaccinated death yet.
Making me feel better about the potential for Vaccines to genuinely get this under control. Covid is never leaving, but if we can reasonably keep protection up with vaccines (scoping out problem variants ahead of time and preparing new vaccines for those, similar to the flu) then I'll take that as a hopefully possible outcome.