It has always been and remains a problem that COVID is functionally invisible to so many Americans. We already medicalize death more than most cultures, but the sensible restrictions on visitors to COVID wards have meant that the disease crippling hospitals across the country goes mostly unwitnessed. We all know getting on a ventilator is bad and having to go on an ECMO machine is worse, but most of us have not heard what lungs sound like when they have that by-now-classic “ground glass appearance” in scans. We have not watched people panicking and yanking tubes out because they can’t breathe. We have not seen patients swollen and full of air, unrecognizable. Or proned. Or having their last conversation before they go on the ventilator. ...
You don’t see most of this stuff in these screenshots, either, but you do see a lot you just wouldn’t otherwise. ...The selfies can be brutal. The photographs family members post are worse because the patient is frequently unconscious, bloated, clearly in a bad way. Relatives’ updates tend to feature obsessive medical details like ventilator settings and oxygen saturations, and you learn to recognize the time course of the disease: When mentions of dialysis start up, you know...that the prognosis is poor. The death announcement—once the requests for prayers and hopes for miracles are over—frequently reveals how much worse it really was than anyone let on: You find out the patient also had MRSA, or had developed an autoimmune disease, or had struggled with strokes and clots.
Seems like you got rattled by some kids on a train. — Tzeentch
I can’t think of any man good enough to be another’s master. Can you? — NOS4A2
From Thursday, no aircraft is allowed within a three nautical mile radius or below 2500 feet of Melbourne's CBD without permission from police.
The "unprecedented" move has sparked anger and the Alliance for Journalists' Freedom (AJF) has demanded police immediately lift the order.
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