Breaking from the substantive to the aesthetic for a moment, this is also beautifully written by the reporters, Isadora Kosofsky and Shawn Hubler.
They thought the worst of the pandemic was behind them. Then a new wave of cases arrived at the I.C.U. at Providence Saint John’s Health Center.
“Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha’olam,” he began in Hebrew, the sterile divider behind him sealing off the patients with Covid-19 from the uninfected. “Blessed are you, Adonai our God, sovereign of all, who has kept us alive, sustained us and brought us to this season.”
Around the physician at the hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., a small army in scrubs — doctors, nurses, technicians — bowed their heads, bearing witness to what seemed to be the beginning of the end of the pandemic. Sixty-nine lives on the ward had been claimed by the virus. Pain and grief, life and death, fear and loss — month after grinding month — all of it had unfolded behind that thin divider.
And yet on this day, not a single patient in the Saint John’s I.C.U. had tested positive for the coronavirus. Dr. Grabie turned, and the I.C.U.’s medical director, helped by a respiratory therapist, zipped the wall open.
“We were all in awe,” recalled the medical director, Dr. Terese Hammond.
It was June 1 at 7:56 a.m., a Tuesday.
Now back to the disconcerting substance:
Vickie Gaddy, a nurse at the intensive care unit with Alejandro Balderas, a 44-year-old patient who later died. Doctors at the hospital say more younger people with Covid-19 are being sent to the I.C.U.
That is hard to look at. To put a name to the patient really brings it home so effectively. We know her name and age and that she passed. Makes me sick.
Now the ward’s Covid section is back and sealed off again.
...
...Even in affluent Santa Monica, where about 80 percent of residents are now vaccinated, dozens of people each day are testing positive for the virus, and hospitals like Saint John’s — a 266-bed facility that typically serves the ordinary needs of the beach communities around it — are being inundated again.
This is so disconcerting because I thought we had the explanation for the Provincetown/Barnstable County and San Francisco hospital data. It was going to be anomalous, I thought, because so many of the cases were in gay men who were hypothesized by me to be in some vaguely understood but clearly seen way to be immunocompromised. PLEASE do not misunderstand that. It was not in any way "better" that it was in gay men, it was a way of making the data, shocking to doctors, scientists, and laypeople alike, anomalous, that you couldn't generalize from that data nation-wide.
Because if Provincetown/Barnstable County and San Francisco were not anomalous, and here in Santa Monica, another highly vaxed but far larger and more heterogeneous community, you see another unexpected surge among the vaccinated, then the vaccines are not working against Delta the way that they were expected. That is the vantablack dark thought that thrusts forward in the brain. The 7-day average of new cases on July 31, 2021, with 70% vaccinated, are much higher than they were at their summer peak in 2020 when no vaccinations were available. And cases now are still climbing. CDC says the vaccines do work against Delta in preventing serious illness (hospitalization) and death among the vaccinated but they become less credible with each repetition of their mantra with those higher case numbers. Even the fully vaccinated are getting infected by Delta, clearly; the vaccinated are transmitting the Delta variant of the virus with the efficiency of the unvacciniated to others, fully vaxed and unvaxed alike, the latter of whom are getting very ill indeed and dying. The most one can say, and it is saying a lot, is that even with those higher case numbers, transmission, and increasing hospitalizations, deaths are still 25% their Summer 2020 peak. But frankly, "These vaccines almost (but not quite) guarantee that you won't get COVID-19 and if you do it won't be too bad, you (almost) certainly won't die or even need hospitalization, but THIS IS NOT A VACCINE AGAINST TRANSMISSION OF COVID-19 FROM YOU TO OTHER PEOPLE! WEAR A MASK"--that is a minimalist conception of "the vaccines work." And this calls up again the haunt triggered by the words of Kathleen Hall Jamieson at Penn: that CDC's handling of the Provincetown/Barnstable County data violated scientific norms, and,
"...they do not appear to be candid about the extent to which breakthroughs are yielding hospitalizations.”
...
“People are coming in sicker,” Dr. Hammond said. At least six people have died from Covid-19 in intensive care at St. John’s since June 1.
...
The patient demographics this time are different [from the initial waves seen at Saint Johns Santa Monica] as well. Earlier in the pandemic, most were transfers from other Providence health care centers. Now many more are local and younger, Dr. Hammond said, and are being sent to intensive care after emergency room visits.
Given Santa Monica’s high vaccination rate, she said, the influx is “disconcerting.”
“Santa Monica was pretty protected,” she said.
...
Last week, so many Covid patients were in intensive care that the space behind the plastic wall was not enough. The hospital had to reconfigure and expand the unit. Bonifacio Deoso, a nurse on the unit, was down to one weary question:
“When will this ever end?”
