The Daily Comet, aka, The Daily Vomit, is a local paper. The headline screamed "COVID surge has filled all ICU beds in Terrebonne, Lafourche and surrounding parishes, official says"
Nope, our Parish President responded to the article:
"I have received a copy of this article and one like it from WDSU (NBC NOLA) from many people as well as received calls and texts about it. The article itself is somewhat miss leading and has caused somewhat of a panic.
Dr Riggins is right in that all 79 beds in our region are full. The problem is that all 79 are not COVID related. In _______, we have 30 staffed ICU beds. 15 of those are COVID patients. That means the other 15 are in for something else, post surgery, heart attack, etc. Also our parish has more ICU beds but due to staffing issues they aren’t always available. Please don’t panic at this article as it’s not completely what it seems.
After reading most of these comments and having some discussions with citizens and a local doctor let me see if I can share why I did this.
I am in no way down playing the fact that we are seeing an uptick in cases and hospitals visits/stays.
I am in no way down playing how hard our health care workers are busting their butts to take care of our residents.
I am in no way down playing how serious having ICU beds full is regardless of why they are.
However what has set me off about this whole pandemic is how the media tends to use shocking head lines. Using a head line to say “COVID surges fills ICU Beds” is not how we should be doing this. I have tried my best to be as open and transparent in everything we do in Parish Government including everything through this virus and this was one more way for me to do that. We will continue to provide the best data we can as we can get it and do our best not to add to the hype. There is enough of that happening in our nation right now."
They have also been known to play games with the number of "beds available" or "beds occupied."
Let's say a hospital has 100 beds total. They set aside 20 for ICU. They have 10 people in ICU beds. That's 50% ICU occupied vs capacity.
Then, they arbitrarily change the number of assigned beds for ICU to 15.
Now, they have 10 of 15 instead of 10 of 20. The "occupied" rate just went UP from 50% to 67%, with no change in number of patients occupying beds.
So, there are numerous ways various people have been doing dirty things.
Of course, straight up fake stories by fake journalists is another.
Ugh, I cannot fathom the depravity and having been an anon for almost 4 years, I've seen some stuff. They scare the elderly and there is zero excuse. My Dad is 83 years old and last year when the covid crap started, he was so frightened that he would die w/in a few months. Thank God, that didn't happen. He, like us, is a digital soldier and does his part by sharing info through his email contacts - about 5000 of them!