So @hinz_tamara & I are giving a Grand Rounds this Friday on Physician Advocacy Through Social Media. I’m going to live tweet some questions from the Rounds and share responses with the group.
But in anticipation of the rounds, I have some questions to my followers:
Feel free to respond to these in replies. This isn’t meant to be anything official, obviously this is not a research methodology. Just curious about what the responses might be.
1) What information do you most value from physicians through social media?
2) Would you look at YOUR doctor differently if you saw them on social media? Does that change the relationship you have with them?
3) Physicians: What has been your experience advocating on social media? Positives and negatives. Both in terms of the response you’ve had but also personal benefit or toll you’ve experienced in this role.
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Not controlling for age (which would make this number worse) and subtracting the estimated number of children <12 in hospital, there are 591 excess hospitalizations due to under vaccination.
That’s almost enough to completely fill the U of A Hospital (which has 650 total beds).
That includes 191 excess ICU beds due to under vaccination. A good size ICU is about 20 beds or so.
So there’s about 9-10 full ICUs in excess of what one might expect if everyone 12+ was vaccinated. (Not accounting for age or decrease in spread due to vaccination.)
Who wants some GRAPHS?
This is your chance of being in hospital with COVID 'right now' in Alberta. Current admission ages estimated based on admission data over the last 120 days.
Some breakthrough in the older age groups, but it's mostly unvaxxed people.
I’ve tweeted about this before but the impact of social media, especially Instagram, on teenagers makes sense from a psychological development point of view.
It’s an app that targets exactly the developmental stage of teens.
One of the major developmental goals for teens is identity formation. Teens strive to figure out who they are. Especially as if it relates to their peers. Younger kids are shaped more by their immediate family. Teens start to expand their circle.
That’s normal developmentally.
So imagine an app that allows you test out aspects of your identity. It gives you instant, immediate feedback. From your peers but also strangers. In fact, make it quantifiable. There’s no guesswork. Here’s the exact number of likes. And who specifically liked it.
Wait, is there going to be a protest against vaccine mandates in Calgary? A city in a province without a vaccine mandate? In front of hospitals that are so overloaded with unvaccinated people (b/c of this lack of mandate) that many vaccinated people had their healthcare canceled?
“What do we want?”
COVID!
“How do we want it?”
In such overwhelming quantities so as to overwhelm the healthcare system and cancel other people’s cancer surgeries!
Like, my dudes, you’ve already won, take the W and leave us be.
“We want to be able to eat at a restaurant without proof of vaccination!”
Sir, you are literally at the Wendy’s in front of U of A hospital. Without proof of vaccination. Now if you’ll excuse me, we’re trying to serve the families of all the unvaccinated people in the ICU.
From my DMs. This is a classic medical ethics question.
I understand the anger and frustration driving this. The philosophical question of fairness & who gets treatment and who doesn’t.
However if we believe in universal healthcare, we can’t ration healthcare based on morality.
If you speed going 200 km/hr, if you give yourself alcohol poisoning because someone dared you to a Centurion, if you lost a game of South Park Roshambo, if you broke your hand in a pointless hockey fight b/c of some dumb “Code”, you shouldn’t get rationed healthcare differently.
We can triage based on severity, based on prognosis, on how likely you are to benefit, on what it is the most appropriate level of care.
But I don’t think we can triage based on whether you made a single bad decision. No matter how poor that decision was.
So, if we look at the rate of hospitalizations for double vaxxed folk (4.8 per 100,000) and apply it to number of people who are under-vaccinated, we can see how many ‘excess’ hospitalizations there are due to under-vaccination.