I live south of Seattle. Seattle is restrictive, everybody outside is wearing masks, many restaurants are still take-out only, business are open for limited hours.
But you go 40 minutes south to, say, Puyallup, and the COVID restrictions are much more relaxed (if present at all).
Meanwhile, the medical group I work for in Seattle is being absolutely swamped by patients being transferred from overwhelmed hospital and urgent care facilities in Pierce and Thurston counties. We've had to stop doing anything but COVID-related care and the only reason we have the capacity to do that is because we don't operate an emergency room so we can't take on the worst-of-the-worst cases.
According to our daily COVID update report, we have a handful of patients who gave residence addresses--we ask for this because the county and state departments of health want it for statistics, among other reasons--inside Seattle and just a few more inside King County.
It's a very stressful time for many of us, and it isn't helped by the disparity in level of care, let's say, over COVID prevention measures even inside the region.
Because we are a not-for-profit medical group that receives funding from the federal government, we are covered by the vaccinate-or-test requirement from CMMS. In my department, IT, we had two employees quit over it; both of them live in Pierce County. Meanwhile, all of us (so far as I know, obviously I am not privy to everyone's medical records so I am going off of what is claimed and who remains employed with us) who live inside Seattle were fully vaccinated months before the requirement took effect.
I'm also sorry if I come across as unsympathetic or uncaring. Even though I "just work with the computers," this has not been easy for me or my department, and I have seen nurses and doctors I have worked with for years and become work friends with reach and then exceed burnout and press on anyway out of a sense of duty and obligation.
So it is just a bit disheartening to read yet another thread on Hacker News where people keep insisting we'll just have to live with it and this is just how things are now and the West Coast is obviously bad because we've tried to put this godforsaken virus first of mind for stamping out. I know we're past being able to eradicate it, but to just throw up our hands and say "well, even a disposable mask with earloops is JUST TOO MUCH" makes me deeply sad.
Sometimes we lose a bit of the big picture in that situation though. It helps to take a look at the actual numbers.
In Pierce County, WA the hospitals have only recently exceeded bed capacity warranting transfers [1], in the past week there was an 8% excess capacity, the total bed capacity of Pierce County is ~460, and last week there were 125 covid admissions. The ICU is not at capacity, it's at 92%, which is typically where ICU utilization sits, if a hospital is profitable.
Pierce County has a new infection rate of about 3.5k per 100,000 [2]. The population of Pierce County is almost 1 million, which gives about 35,000 total case infections for 14 days. Of roughly 35,000 infections, there were 125 admissions over the past week. For excess capacity transfer patients, the number is somewhere around 35 to 40 people.
That's certainly enough to feel a strain with when you're working there day to day, but from the average Pierce County resident who's chance of admission in a given week (not age or health adjusted) of 0.000125, I think it's understandable why they may not feel like participating in all of the restrictive measures.
https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity...
https://www.tpchd.org/healthy-people/diseases/covid-19/pierc...
I know (and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way, I do agree with you), and I get it. In our practice's case, we're not taking transfers of patients who would be in the ED/ER (we don't have those facilities), we're taking patients who are in for the "long COVID" type symptoms or who need other kinds of longer-term care. I think, though I don't know for sure, that some hospitals in Pierce and Thurston are asking outfits like ours to take patients prior to the ICU getting full so those hospitals can leave a spare bed or two for the true emergency cases.
I guess what I'm saying is it feels like so many of us on the "invisible" end, from medical providers to service workers to public health officials to warehouse folks to all the rest, are expending so much effort to keep things going that to hear people complain that their wellbeing is impacted because they have to exercise behind a mask six days a week just...falls flat. And I feel guilty even typing that out because MENTAL HEALTH IS ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT and for some people that does mean physical exercise and yes anxiety CAN result from mask wearing. But it seems like there are those who genuinely experience those symptoms, and then there are those who are hiding their petulant "I don't wanna and you can't make me nyah" behind claiming those symptoms. And the overlap between the latter group and the group of people who flatly refuse to be vaccinated so that we can all dump these masks and rules is damn near a circle.
Anyway, I think we largely agree, and I'm just tired, but not as tired as some.