Vermont prioritises BIPOC over white people for COVID-19 vaccine

[ZiprHead]

First, triage is almost always understood to be in the context of individual presentations, not population risk profiles.

And you are wrong again.

tri·age
/trēˈäZH/

noun

(in medical use) the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties.
"a triage nurse"

verb

assign degrees of urgency to (wounded or ill patients).
"victims were triaged by paramedics before being transported to hospitals"

Definitions from Oxford Languages

 

[Metaphor]

Yes, you did want the limited supply opened to all when you objected to some people being prioritized over others.

No, I didn't. I did not say that nor did I imply it. I did not object to "some people" being prioritised over others. I objected to this particular discrimination by race.

I never objected to the age prioritisation, for example. In fact, given the age effects of COVID, the age priority should have been more prominent. Instead of BIPOC becoming a priority category, Vermont should have moved forward the age category dates.

Of course there's a limited supply. That's the entire purpose of triage, directing limited resources to patients most at risk.

I did not ask if there was a limited supply. I asked if Vermont's rollout was at capacity. There's a difference.

And I'm saying black people are far more at risk from contracting this disease than white people, that's why they are being triaged ahead of white people. You save one white person but two black people could die because of that. Are two black lives worth less than one white life?

There is an additional risk that black people have over white people. But there is a massive additional risk that a 45 year old has over a 19 year old.

 

[Metaphor]

First, triage is almost always understood to be in the context of individual presentations, not population risk profiles.

And you are wrong again.

tri·age
/trēˈäZH/

noun

(in medical use) the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties.
"a triage nurse"

verb

assign degrees of urgency to (wounded or ill patients).
"victims were triaged by paramedics before being transported to hospitals"

Definitions from Oxford Languages

You literally quoted a definition that referred to the individual circumstances of patients and casualties. The definition was not


(in medical use) the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number groups of patients or casualties.

 

[ZiprHead]

And you are wrong again.

You literally quoted a definition that referred to the individual circumstances of patients and casualties. The definition was not


(in medical use) the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number groups of patients or casualties.

 

[Metaphor]

And you are wrong again.

You literally quoted a definition that referred to the individual circumstances of patients and casualties. The definition was not


(in medical use) the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number groups of patients or casualties.

Medical triage is not typically done on "groups". When you go to emergency, the triage nurse does not say "okay, we're seeing everyone over 60 now, over 60 to the front of the line."

But for goodness sake, I did not and do not reject the notion that you could prioritise some groups over others. I just said it is not the same thing as medical triage that considers individuals and their unique circumstances.

 

[ZiprHead]

Medical triage is not typically done on "groups". When you go to emergency, the triage nurse does not say "okay, we're seeing everyone over 60 now, over 60 to the front of the line."

But for goodness sake, I did not and do not reject the notion that you could prioritise some groups over others. I just said it is not the same thing as medical triage that considers individuals and their unique circumstances.

Again,

 

[Metaphor]

Medical triage is not typically done on "groups". When you go to emergency, the triage nurse does not say "okay, we're seeing everyone over 60 now, over 60 to the front of the line."

But for goodness sake, I did not and do not reject the notion that you could prioritise some groups over others. I just said it is not the same thing as medical triage that considers individuals and their unique circumstances.

Again,

Your affliction of out of control eye rolling probably won't get you to the top of the list in emergency. People have real problems there.

 

[ZiprHead]

Again,

Your affliction of out of control eye rolling probably won't get you to the top of the list in emergency. People have real problems there.

For someone who is usually such a stickler on the meaning of words, your mangling of the meaning of the word triage is quite amusing.

 

[Metaphor]

Again,

Your affliction of out of control eye rolling probably won't get you to the top of the list in emergency. People have real problems there.

For someone who is usually such a stickler on the meaning of words, your mangling of the meaning of the word triage is quite amusing.

Sure luv.

 

[Toni]

Medical triage is not typically done on "groups". When you go to emergency, the triage nurse does not say "okay, we're seeing everyone over 60 now, over 60 to the front of the line."

But for goodness sake, I did not and do not reject the notion that you could prioritise some groups over others. I just said it is not the same thing as medical triage that considers individuals and their unique circumstances.

Not when there is a large number of patients due to an accident, fire, or similar disaster.

In such cases, when there are a large number of urgent/potentially urgent cases, then yes, whoever is working triage will organize them as quickly as possible according to the urgency/potential life threatening need. It could be: whoever was in vehicle A or in Chem Room 207 or anyone under 15? Or Over 65 or with asthma or unconscious, etc.

The pandemic is an massive scale medical emergency. Massive numbers of patients need to be vaccinated. Even if we had sufficient doses to vaccinate everyone in every location globally in a well staffed, well supplied medical clinic, we would be unable to vaccinate everyone simultaneously and in order to avoid chaos, we'd have to set parameters that made sense. The parameters that various states set make sense to their health departments given their populations and various demographics within the state and how they have seen the disease progress over the course of the year or so before vaccines were widely available. They identified which groups had shown increased vulnerability to disease requiring hospitalization or death, and set priorities according to that data.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

population-based triage

 

[Metaphor]

Medical triage is not typically done on "groups". When you go to emergency, the triage nurse does not say "okay, we're seeing everyone over 60 now, over 60 to the front of the line."

But for goodness sake, I did not and do not reject the notion that you could prioritise some groups over others. I just said it is not the same thing as medical triage that considers individuals and their unique circumstances.

Not when there is a large number of patients due to an accident, fire, or similar disaster.

In such cases, when there are a large number of urgent/potentially urgent cases, then yes, whoever is working triage will organize them as quickly as possible according to the urgency/potential life threatening need. It could be: whoever was in vehicle A or in Chem Room 207 or anyone under 15? Or Over 65 or with asthma or unconscious, etc.

The pandemic is an massive scale medical emergency. Massive numbers of patients need to be vaccinated. Even if we had sufficient doses to vaccinate everyone in every location globally in a well staffed, well supplied medical clinic, we would be unable to vaccinate everyone simultaneously and in order to avoid chaos, we'd have to set parameters that made sense. The parameters that various states set make sense to their health departments given their populations and various demographics within the state and how they have seen the disease progress over the course of the year or so before vaccines were widely available. They identified which groups had shown increased vulnerability to disease requiring hospitalization or death, and set priorities according to that data.

And as I've said about a hundred times now, the risk of age dwarfs the race risk by orders of magnitude. Not a single 19 year old without medical conditions should have been put ahead of a 45 year old without medical conditions. The eligibility of age cohorts should have been pushed forward instead of prioritising healthy BIPOC people.

EDIT: And, even if you did prioritise some non-white people, Asians should not have been included. Asians are either at the same or lower risk from COVID compared to white people. The only reason for their inclusion is the political category "BIPOC".

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And if your aunt had balls she would be your uncle.

We are the ones advocating for vaccinating in risk order. Note that risk order is based both on how serious it is likely to be for you and how likely you are to get it. When you deviate from risk order (such as in this misguided discrimination) you increase the death toll.

You are operating from false premises and making a bad argument to boot. You are NOT advocating for risk order. Risk order, according to you, is documented medical risk, age, then socio-economic status. But the whole thread is that protected classes are discrimination and therefore unconstitutional, meaning both age and socio-economic status go bye-bye. So your "we"--you and Metaphor--are not in alignment.

Secondly, having a risk order of 1. documented medical risk, 2. age, 3. race is an IMPROVEMENT over not including race at all. It's a quick and dirty proxy for an amalgam of other factors that are NOT equivalent to merely socio-economic status. For example, Native Americans are not solely lacking access to healthcare because of socio-economic status and African Americans do not mistrust the system more because of socio-economic status but instead because of historical racism. Giving the other groups higher priority after taking into account medical risks and age is COLLECTIVELY better, then.

The problem is that you are assuming the pattern actually is racial and not socioeconomic. What we did here was prioritize people in jobs that expose them to a lot of other people.

Finally, your whole weird claim that this is zero sum game is just that--weird. It's actually a statistical game. Each vaccination is worth more to African Americans or Native Americans than to Whites on a given day because the probability of death is higher among those groups. It's a decimal, not a whole number. Just as a mere example, the vaccine could be worth .005 lives to a senior citizen, .002 lives to a 30 year old Native American, .001 lives to a 30 year old African American, and .0005 lives to a 30 year old White American ON AVERAGE. (These are not actual numbers, just an example) BUT You are saving in total MORE LIVES by having a risk order policy.

As always, assuming racism.

There's no road to hell here...it's a nuance and it's already being done by age across the whole country. People only started hysterically screaming about it when a very small state with a low rate of covid and a small minority population agreed to include race into their system of triage... Because it saves more lives than otherwise not doing it.

The age difference poses far more risk than the supposed "racial" risk.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Priority lists are developed, drawing broad categories to minimize morbidity and mortality and in the case of Covid19, to minimize or at least spread out the strain on the health care system.

Yes, those who must wait for vaccinations are at greater risk for becoming ill until they have been vaccinated. No, no system is perfect. Trends for illness, severity of illness and death vary by region and between individuals. I know a couple of people in their 90’s who became ill with Covid and who have recovered well. And someone who was apparently otherwise very healthy who was ill with Covid, requiring months of hospitalization and who ultimately died from it. Not at all what statistics would have predicted.

Expecting a priority list to perfectly arrange all individuals according to risk is unrealistically valuing the perfect at the expense of the good.

The question is whether those priority lists are being developed correctly.

The answer is clearly wrong in every case because there is inadequate age prioritization. It should have been stepping down 5 or 10 years at a time, not jumping from 65+ to 16+ in one step.

Thus don't pretend they got it right and there's no room for improvement.

This racism was because of a IIRC 2.4x increased risk. 40-49 has 13x the risk of 18-29. In other words, taking BIPOC over older people killed about 5x as many as needed to die waiting. (And if you count the next bracket up you're looking at 15x the death toll.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I didn't suggest opening the limited supply to all. Although, it isn't clear to me how limited the supply is. Is Vermont operating at absolute capacity with its rollout?

What I asked in the OP was whether the rollout schedule was Constitutional due to the discrimination by race. I haven't received a direct answer to this, but from additional reading I've done since, overall opinion is it is more likely Constitutional than not.

I'm not sure what your illustration is supposed to say: is a white life worth less than a black life?

Yes, you did want the limited supply opened to all when you objected to some people being prioritized over others.

Of course there's a limited supply. That's the entire purpose of triage, directing limited resources to patients most at risk.

And I'm saying black people are far more at risk from contracting this disease than white people, that's why they are being triaged ahead of white people. You save one white person but two black people could die because of that. Are two black lives worth less than one white life?

His scenario is trading one black life for 5 white lives, though. (Admittedly, the death rate data is by age brackets, I can't look up the increased risk for the exact ages.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Sticking your head in the sand doesn't change the fact that sticking Charmaine instead of Delia increased the chance of someone dying.

Show your work? I skimmed the latest posts and reached the opposite conclusion: that "sticking" Charmaine was the percentage play.

Only by sticking your head in the sand about the age risk. Since nobody on the left seems capable of verifying what we are saying, here's the data:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/201...s-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html

Quit trying to sacrifice people on the altar of racism.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

To be fair, I think he just thinks the wrong people were prioritized. I think he thinks it should be white males ages 25-45 first and after that, who cares?

You're assuming racism he didn't show.

What he's saying is 45 over 25 is a far bigger risk than race.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But white people where not blocked from the vaccine. Apparently you are mistaken about what “priority” means. It does means go to the front of the line – it does not mean anyone is blocked. Besides, the priority categories included many sorts of white people.

The standard error of the "anti"-discrimination crowd.

Every person in your preferred group you benefit means one person in your disadvantaged group is harmed. It's a zero-sum game. Before engaging in any such preferences you need to consider this and confirm that the benefit you confer is greater than the harm you inflict. However, the "anti"-discrimination crowd continually denies that the harm is being done. That only makes sense if you know you're doing harm but think the goal is worth it anyway. In other words, the paving material of the road to hell.

I am in constant awe at your ability to construct such bullshit straw men so consistently.

Calling it bullshit doesn't make it go away. Even if the racial risk is real the age risk is far greater than the racial risk.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

First, triage is almost always understood to be in the context of individual presentations, not population risk profiles.

And you are wrong again.

tri·age
/trēˈäZH/

noun

(in medical use) the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties.
"a triage nurse"

verb

assign degrees of urgency to (wounded or ill patients).
"victims were triaged by paramedics before being transported to hospitals"

Definitions from Oxford Languages

You really shot yourself in the foot here. The definition you are presenting supports his position, not yours! Triage is about prioritizing treatment of individuals in a mass casualty situation. (Note that "mass casualty" in this context doesn't mean exactly what you think it means--it's considered a mass casualty situation so long as the number of people treating patients is less than the number of injured people. The situation can change back and forth. Lets try a scenario: I'm out hiking, I see two people take a serious tumble. Mass casualty situation. I do a quick assessment, A is howling in pain with a limb lying crooked, B is lying there--triage, I go to B. Another hiker hears the screams and comes. Assuming their knowledge is similar to mine it is no longer a mass casualty situation. We figure out neither has any imminent risks that we can address. I grab my inReach and push the SOS, a helicopter shows up and lowers a paramedic. Once again a mass casualty situation.)

 

[ZiprHead]

Sticking your head in the sand doesn't change the fact that sticking Charmaine instead of Delia increased the chance of someone dying.

Show your work? I skimmed the latest posts and reached the opposite conclusion: that "sticking" Charmaine was the percentage play.

Only by sticking your head in the sand about the age risk. Since nobody on the left seems capable of verifying what we are saying, here's the data:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/201...s-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html

Quit trying to sacrifice people on the altar of racism.

Did you seperate those death rates by race? No. So you cannot make that determination.

According to this Stanford Medicine study the disease is significantly more deadly to blacks and hispanics