this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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COVID was somehow the visceral turning point. Variations on visitor restrictions in hospitals still exist since then due to the extraordinary and amazing displays of bad behavior from that time.
People could always behave badly. Direct care staff, as one example, have been wearing panic buttons linked directly to security and calling a violence code over the announcement system, since around 2015 on the medical side of things.
But COVID was a severe escalation point. Families screaming in hallways that the diagnoses was “fake news” or part of the hospitals “corporate conspiracy” escalating to the point of pulling medical equipment off their loved ones, who could not breathe without that medical equipment.
Behaviors that could potentially kill people wrapped up in an inexorable belief that science was lying. No trust of medical personnel who are there to help whatever the system around them contrives to do with care.
While the behaviors are not like COVID times any more, there’s a residual skepticism of, well, everything since that time. Sadly, one that is preyed upon by politics to keep us fighting one another instead of punching up.
Forgive me, maybe “punching up” is now a ban-worthy turn of phrase.
I'm in a very conservative state and until recently I worked in hospitals around the country. You would not believe the amount of times I've heard covid conspiracy shit from actual healthcare workers. The most common one is that it's just the flu, but when anyone died for any reason at the time they put down covid as cause of death. Why would anyone do this? I guess it doesn't have to make sense. Just to hazard a guess I'd say more than half of the people in my state believe some form of covid conspiracy or disinformation.
I used to live in Seattle and while I didn't work in the medical field... I knew quite a lot of nurses and other, fairly entry level kinds of medical workers.
Most of these people, again, in Seattle, a supposed bastion of lefties... were vaccine skeptics or outright antivax, when COVID happened.
A lot of these people came from the more conservative areas outside Seattle, and then worked in Seattle because it was the only area hiring... but yeah, my anecdotal experience was/is that many medical staff themselves succumbed to vaccine conspiracies, and would freely admit and bitch about masking and vaccines when off the job.
Not even just off the job. I worked at a surgery center during the first few years of COVID, and I still distinctly remember at least one surgeon walking around the clinical areas with a mask that read "this mask does nothing". And I'm pretty sure he was seeing patients wearing that too.
I am still baffled by that, because this fucking window licker had to have taken microbiology, and literally wore a mask every goddamned times they did the thing they trained for.
I'd be discussing declining the procedure based on that. I don't know if I'd pull the trigger, based on a number of things: how likely can I get the procedure done elsewhere or by a different surgeon, how badly and quickly do I need the procedure, insurance issues. But I'd certainly try to talk to hospital staff about it.
On the other hand, I've heard Herman Cain was an idiot savant. So just because they can't make change without an automatic register doesn't mean they can't do surgery.