CV and mad panic behaviour

[DJC]

The senior intensive care physician, who spoke to The Age on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak publicly, said despite a decline being reported in the official daily hospital numbers last month, the true number of COVID-19 patients in ICU had been hovering near 190 every day for weeks.

“You’ve got a system in Victoria that’s so close to being overwhelmed it has just skated by over the last few weeks,” the doctor, who works at a large Melbourne hospital, said.

I'll agree to disagree  and like I said I'll go with the ICU Dr's and staff working in the Melbourne Hospitals who are on the front line and the article confirms what I have been told by people who know staff at those hospitals. Staff have been deterred from speaking  so it must be serious when senior physicians are speaking off the record to the media like "the Age"
There needs to be an Australian standard in reporting cases and I find it confusing how the states report differently especially the two largest and main affected in NSW and Victoria.

So, a senior intensive care physician at one hospital has a better take on the overall COVID numbers in ICUs than the Health Department?  Give me a break!

For a start, public and private hospital employees may only speak to the media with permission.  To do otherwise requires anonymity.  That's not Government deterring staff from speaking out, it's standard media management that dates back to the Kennett years when it comes to public hospitals, and even longer in the case of private hospitals;

I have family and friends in the public and private health systems and half of the folk in my neighbourhood are surgeons working in Geelong and Melbourne.  They consistently state that, while our health system is under-funded and under stress, it is coping very well with the additional burden of COVID cases taking up ICU beds.

And for a first hand account of what it's like in an ICU with COVID patients:

Increasingly, the vast majority filling the [Sunshine Hospital's Intensive Care Unit] are severely ill unvaccinated people, some who remain adamant that COVID-19 does not exist even when they are succumbing to the virus.

Others come to the realisation too late that the deadly virus is real, begging for a vaccine before being hooked up to a ventilator, unsure whether they will regain consciousness.

“It has been incredibly challenging and distressing,” Western Health intensive care director Craig French said.

“Patients and their families have expressed the belief that they don’t have COVID, it’s not real to them, even though they are critically ill or somebody they love is very, very sick.”
https://www.theage.com.au/national/in-th...596gc.html

In July this year, opposition health spokesperson, Georgie Crozier, criticised the Victorian Government for increasing ICU and critical care beds from 499 (ICU) beds in July 2020 to 1606, arguing that we would never need that many.  Aren't you glad that the LNP aren't in charge of our health system?