Alaska, Idaho, and Montana have all declared emergencies in their health care systems, and enacted Crisis Care rules for determining who gets treatment.

For year, republiclowns lied that universal health care would lead to “rationing” and “euthanasia”.  How will they explain to constituents now that their refusal to enforce mask wearing and discouraging vaccination has now led to rationed care and doctors forced to choose who lives and dies?  There is already one confirmed case of a patient who died from lack of care.  As Rachel Maddow reported on her show (video below), two people in need of kidney dialysis were forced to wait for treatment because hospitals were overrun with COVID-19 patients.  One of the two died.

This will continue to get worse, and continue to spread to other republican states.  How long before trumpkin sycophants and wannabes like Desantis lie and claim “Biden is euthanizing people, don’t get vaccinated!”?

More below.

I have more amateur hour statistics to show you.

After hearing about Alaska, Idaho, and Montana’s situation, and reading about other anti-vaxxer and denialist states heading down the same road, I took a look at Worldometers’s page for the US, and the state by state list of COVID-19 cases and deaths.  There’s an interesting trend which should be a big warning for the next year, and a big poke in the eye of Jared Kushner for his plans of a year ago.

The problem with most public COVID-19 data is that it’s all totals, it doesn’t show any trends.  Mass outbreaks of a years ago don’t mean much if the disease is largely under control now.  On the page for each US state, you can see trends over the past 20 months, peaks and troughs of both the number of cases per day, and the number of deaths per day.  The states where those numbers are peaking and declining speak volumes.

I divided the cases and deaths into three time ranges:

• March 2020 to July 2020, the first wave
• October 2020 to February 2021, the massive second wave spread between the election and inauguration (followed by Biden’s mandates)
  
• July 2021 to the present, the summer third wave

On the table below, 1, 2, and 3 represent peaks in the number of cases during the three time periods, while 4, 5, and 6 represent peaks in the number of deaths during those times.  (An asterisk following some “2”s represents two peaks in that time frame.)  This shows where the majority of cases have happened, and when (or if) a state had its first, second, or third peak.

“Gov.” and “Sen.” represent each states’ governors and senators, those having the biggest influence on policy and public attiudes towards masks, vaccines, and other measures which combat COVID-19.  (Georgia has DD/RR because of last fall’s election, its two senators being part of Cheetolini’s rabble until they lost the election.)  It’s noticeable and ironic that the states which Kushner wanted to “punish” for being mostly democratic are the ones now doing the best.

                Gov.  Sen.     Cases    Deaths
                
Alabama          R    RR       1 2 3      5 6 
Alaska           R    RR         2 3      5 6 
Arizona          R    Dd         2        5   
Arkansas         R    RR         2 3      5 6 
California       D    DD         2        5   
Colorado         D    DD         2        5   
Connecticut      D    DD         2      4 5   
Delaware         D    DD         2 3    4 5   
D of C                           2 3    4 5   
Florida          R    RR       1 2 3    4 5 6 
Georgia          R    DD(RR)   1 2 3    4 5 6 
Hawaii           D    DD           3          
Idaho            R    RR         2 3      5 6 
Illinois         D    DD         2 3    4 5   
Indiana          R    RR         2 3    4 5 6 
Iowa             R    RR         2 3      5   
Kansas           D    RR         2 3      5   
Kentucky         D    RR         2 3      5 6 
Louisiana        D    RR       1 2 3    4 5 6 
Maine            D    IR         2 3      5   
Maryland         R    DD       1 2 3    4 5   
Massachusetts    R    DD         2      4 5   
Michigan         D    DD         2*     4 5   
Minnesota        D    DD         2        5   
Mississippi      R    RR         2 3      5 6 
Missouri         R    RR         2 3      5   
Montana          R    DR         2 3      5   
Nebraska         R    RR         2        5   
Nevada           D    DD       1 2 3    4 5 6 
New Hampshire    R    DD         2 3    4 5   
New Jersey       D    DD       1 2 3    4     
New Mexico       D    DD         2        5   
New York         D    DD       1 2      4     
North Carolina   D    RR         2 3      5 6 
North Dakota     R    RR         2 3      5   
Ohio             R    DR         2 3      5   
Oklahoma         R    RR         2 3      5 6 
Oregon           D    DD         2 3      5 6 
Pennsylvania     D    DR         2*     4 5   
Rhode Island     D    DD       1 2 3    4 5   
South Carolina   R    RR         2 3      5 6 
South Dakota     R    RR         2 3      5   
Tennessee        R    RR         2 3      5 6 
Texas            R    RR       1 2 3    4 5 6 
Utah             R    RR         2 3      5 6 
Vermont          R    DI         2 3      5   
Virginia         D    DD         2 3      5   
Washington       D    DD         2 3      5 6 
West Virginia    R    dR         2 3      5 6 
Wisconsin        D    DR         2 3      5   
Wyoming          R    RR         2 3      5 6

If a state doesn’t have a third peak (no “3” or especially no “6”), it means they have COVID-19 under control.  Many republican states don’t have a “1” or a “4”, but they have the other peaks in spades.  A few states have all six peaks, most of them republican with the exceptions of Washington, Oregon, and Nevada.  Washington is the only one of those three in danger of enacting Crisis Care, and that’s only because its hospitals are being overrun by cases brought in from Idaho.

Newsweek reports this, emphasis in the text mine:

Hospitals in 10 States Are at or Nearing Crisis Levels Since Surge in Delta Variant

Surging COVID-19 case numbers across multiple U.S. regions are pushing some hospitals to crisis levels under the strain, prompting the rationing of health care in some situations. As of Thursday, hospitals in 10 states are either enacting crisis care standards or are approaching that point.

With intensive care unit beds filling up to between 90 percent and 100 percent capacity in some places, largely driven by the Delta variant surge, many hospitals are being forced to consider enacting “crisis standards of care,” which is considered a last resort system of prioritizing the patients who are most likely to survive in a disaster situation and rationing the dwindling hospital resources available.

The entire state of Idaho has enacted “crisis standards of care” according to an announcement from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) on Thursday.

[. . .]

On Tuesday, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, the largest hospital in the state, implemented “crisis standards of care” following overloaded ICU and emergency room beds.

[. . .]

Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas and Arkansas all have 10 percent or less of their ICU beds available, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Although only two states have hospitals that have officially enacted crisis standards of care, many others are very close.

“We are right on the edge of entering crisis standards of care. I hope we don’t get to that point, but it could very easily happen,” Dr. Bruce Siegel, president of America’s Essential Hospitals, a group representing hundreds of medical centers, told NPR. “We’re in a very dangerous place, given the level of our surge.”

Washington state has been struggling with the decision to implement crisis procedures or not as it accepts a surge of patients from Idaho.