Center Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH explains, "There's enormous amounts of disappointment, frustration, anger.  You certainly hear that when you speak to people in the healthcare system.  Some 80 percent of the folks we're seeing coming into our hospitals with COVID now, are the relatively few people remaining who are completely unvaccinated.  That's who's showing up on our doorsteps and that is very frustrating, as we this week are looking at implementing "Crisis Standards of Care," because our health system is so swamped.

At our health system for example, the national standard is you should have is one respiratory technician for every 5 people you have on a ventilator.  We currently have one respiratory technician for every 15 people we have on ventilators.  That's not only unsafe for patients, that's not at all ideal for those respiratory technicians.  They are really being crushed by this current wave."
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Califf, 70, a renowned cardiologist and researcher, is senior adviser for Verily, a research organization, and Google Health. He spent much of his career at Duke University, where he founded the Duke Clinical Research Institute. CBH Research Director Eric G. Campbell is a health-policy expert who has done extensive research on the impact of financial conflicts of interest in medicine, said Califf’s past ties with industry should not disqualify him.  “To my knowledge those relationships have been fully discussed and widely debated in the academic and political arena,” Campbell said, adding that many academic trials are underwritten by drug companies.  Read article>>