The White House’s latest COVID-19 plan, announced on Tuesday, is vectored toward “battening down the hatches” as the presently besieged U.S. hospital facilities are expected to be hit with a tsunami of cases. However, there is no recognition that anything has been learned from the failures of the vaccine rollout up to now; in particular, the rise of Delta and Omicron variants from the ‘benign neglect’ of leaving major parts of the world as ‘human Petri dishes.’ Rather, a further retreat against the viral enemy, with the hope of salvaging what is left of our decimated hospitals—with political blame to be laid upon 40 million unvaccinated American adults.
According to the White House Fact Sheet, the administration’s actions are designed to “mitigate the impact unvaccinated individuals have on our health care system” by expanding testing and vaccinations. Besides the sixty deployments done by the “Winter COVID-19 emergency response team deployments to states,” there are to be 1,000 more military doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other medical personnel available to hospitals in January and February. Emergency response teams are presently being deployed to Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Vermont, increasing the total of federal medical personnel deployed during the Omicron period from 300 to 400.
FEMA is to coordinate planning among the states for hospital bed capacity, plus pre-positioning of supplies and resources. There is no crash program to expand hospital capacity. The examples provided are more along the lines of the two surge facilities in Shreveport, LA; extra beds in Baltimore; and expanded ICU and emergency departments in Fresno, CA—pathetically feeble capacity, given the radical “down-sizing” of hospital capacity for the last many years. So, the band-aid is offered, that FEMA will also be deploying hundreds of ambulances and emergency medical teams to move patients from jammed hospitals to less jammed facilities.
