No, we don’t have to do those at the same time as a public health crisis, and ICU beds are not overflowing due to the maladies you enumerated. They are overflowing because of the unvaccinated.
>They are overflowing because of the unvaccinated.
Source for this claim? Asking because I see stats being thrown around constantly: unvaccinated are 97% of ICU patients, etc. The only problem is, there's no data to back it up.
I've followed sources to the very end to try and locate this data but it doesn't exist. Most lazily point at the CDC but even they openly admit the data isn't reliable because they aren't tracking breakthrough cases correctly.
Associated Press did an analysis of the data. The CDC won't give numbers because the figures we have are patchy, good for some states and poor or non existent from others, so they can't calculate population wide figures. The AP just looked at the most comprehensive figures we have for those areas that do have strong reporting.
This is also consistent with figures from the UK that keeps much more comprehensive and consistent records, because it has a unified national health infrastructure, as well as much higher vaccination rates.
The data for vaccination status of people that are hospitalized should not be impacted by the way people that are not hospitalized are tracked...the proportion of vaccinated people in the ICU is independent from the overall number of breakthrough infections (because their vaccination status can be recorded by the hospital directly).
Most of the unvaccinated in the ICU are either overweight, have preexisting conditions, or are old. I don't see any reason not to attack other root causes to clear out the ICUs while we are at it, right?
Long term health should absolutely be prioritized. However, given resources are limited (especially people's attention span), we should prioritize the highest impact, lowest cost opportunities to return back to our previous normal.
It's easier to move the needle with vaccinations and masks, compared to obesity and smoking - both of which have been in the crosshairs of public health officials for decades. They're just harder to move in the short term.
Well, actually, you can safely lose 2 lbs per week of body weight. The pandemic has been going on long enough that that works out to 150 lbs for someone who started slowly losing weight as soon as the pandemic began (the obesity connection was obvious and well publicized early on)
Almost all obese people are less than 150 lbs overweight. So yeah, at both an individual and societal level, we should have responded (and should respond today) by treating obesity as a public health emergency (or at an individual level a personal medical emergency) similar to early stage cancer, severe hypertension, or serious nutrient deficiency, etc.
The medical evidence even before covid was clear: obesity kills.
I'm going to cross over into controversial territory when I say that in the total absence of modern processed foods and modern sedentism, becoming or staying obese is difficult for most people. (If this were not true, how to explain that obesity was and is rare in places with neither of the above? Why do my size L clothes get labelled as size XL in France and Asia? Why do obesity levels keep rising in America as sedentism and processed food keep marching on? WHY was obesity unknown in my family until immigrated from a traditional agricultural society where every family had deep culinary knowledge
and walked or rode horses everywhere to a modern industrialized car dependent one where food comes from freezers and microwaves, and then immediately became very common? Why is Asia thinner than Europe, Europe thinner than NYC and other walkable northeastern cities with a lot of food choice, and those places thinner than flyover country america?)
This is an easy problem to solve. It hasn't been solved for decades because bathing the population in processed food and sedentism can't be offset by a few public service ads imploring people to spend all their energies fighting their artificially unhealthy environment. Instead, just give people a healthy environment and watch the problem melt away.
Sell healthy food as ubiquitously as fast food and make it easy to get around without a car. Problem solved or at least severely improved. Lots of data obviously showing this.
This is a problem we can solve, or at least make enough headway on to save millions of lives. We should have been on it before, but covid should have been a watershed moment on this.
Instead we got pandemic stress baking and in some places, even outdoor exercise bans.
