view the rest of the comments
News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
Yeah it sucks the family ignored the quarantine orders, I agree. Maybe they should be held liable for that.
What concerns me more, and what we should be talking about, is that the kid shows up at the hospital and two other patients contact the disease. At the hospital.
Being at a hospital should not be a threat to ones health. This along with other hospital borne illness and the insane amount of preventable deaths from medical negligence should concern all of us.
Measles is incredibly infectious, it's why we eradicated it in the first place. Plus there are rules to follow in a hospital waiting room specifically designed to avoid that.
But it relies on people actually following rules, and we can assume someone that didn't vaccinate or follow quarantine procedure is not a big fan of following "meaningless" rules. And meaningless to them is any rule they don't understand. Unfortunately they actively try to understand as little as possible so no one can accuse them of being the very scariest word to them right now, "woke".
The most infectious we've encountered and recorded.
Waiting rooms are the worst. I'm so glad we finally have the technology to allow us to check in from home and completely avoid waiting rooms.
It's likely that this was probably an ER visit. That means they still would've had to wait in the ER waiting room in order of importance.
The ER staff make educated guesses of how important it is someone gets seen right now based on reported symptoms, reported recent travels, temperature, etc.. Then people get seen in order from (for lack of a better phrase) most likely to die right now to least likely. Sometimes, the ER waiting room staff get it wrong, sometimes the patient isn't entirely honest, and sometimes symptoms unexpectedly worsen or change while the patient is in the waiting room.
Another scenario: if this wasn't an ER visit but instead a scheduled hospital visit, they likely still would've had to wait. They could probably fill out the required forms online, but they probably still would've had to wait until a doctor was actually available to see them, which could take a while. Doctors are almost never on time for appointments, mainly because they can only roughly estimate how long each appointment will actually take, and that's arguably more true for hospitals than it is for your normal neighborhood doctor.
All that to say that, unfortunately, hospital waiting rooms typically aren't very avoidable.
My local US Hospital has check in online for ER visits and then wait in car to be told to come in. You can't always do that if you get brought in a ambulance but for a broken arm or leg you can check in online and wait in your car.
Ah, that's different from what I was thinking of, which was filling out the paperwork ahead of time online and then going in for your appointment on the day of.
Not without a total overhaul of the intake process and a redesign of the necessary infrastructure, at least. Controlled access, keeping patients separate, delays to change the air and sanitize each room before a new patient is admitted, etcetera.
It sounds both practical and doable to me, but also expensive.
It sounds like it wasn't obvious the first child had measles when they were admitted. The initial symptoms don't include the rash. Measles is uncommon here, and it's ludicrously infectious, well above flu or most other similar-appearing diseases.
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/symptoms/signs-symptoms.html
It also sounds like, as soon as they realized, the hospital tried to prevent the spread by giving medication to those exposed. This parent refused it.
Being in a place where sick people are is a threat to your health. Sick people go to the hospital. What do you think the hospital is for?
I ask that you rethink this direction.
Hospitals, and people who are trying to save lives, should not be held responsible for the negligence of the ignorant few.
They spend a lot of time, money, and training on preventing Hospital Acquired ID, but they can only prevent so much. Sometimes it's due to negligence, but they can't restrain a child in a waiting room, they can't stop 100℅ of spread. Without knowing the facts of the case (which they are surely reviewing), please don't jump to blame.
I wouldn't blame the hospitals themselves so much as the tradition of waiting room triage.
We shouldn't be concentrating a bunch of potentially-contaigous inpatients together at all, but remodeling the infrastructure to design around a more sterile intake process would be expensive.
Agreed. And wouldn't be considered expensive if there was a cap on profits.
Contrary to popular belief, the hospital is not a completely sanitary place.
Rather, it's a place they try their absolute hardest to keep as sanitary as possible because they don't want the healthy people (doctors, nurses, visitors, etc.) to get sick and because they don't want the sick people (patients) to get even more sick.
Germs can unfortunately slip through the cracks even if every procedure is followed to the letter. There are times where they break procedure either on purpose or by accident (and doctors and hospitals can be put on the hook, legally, for those times), but this doesn't seem to be one of those times given what we know right now.
The R naught (how many people a disease spreads to per infected person) on measles is insane; the average infected person can spread it to 12-18 people (source https://www.sciencenews.org/article/one-number-can-help-explain-why-measles-so-contagious)
Covid is like 1.2- 1.4 people per infected person. It left 1,000,000 Americans dead, which is about 416 Pearl Harbors or 333 9/11s.
The Spanish flu of 1918 killed multiple millions and, if memory serves, had an R naught of 2-3. Basically, our underfunded hospitals stand no chance against something so unbelievably infectious. Thank God we have a vaccine for it.