If you wish to remain independent of media’s emotional manipulation, you must re-learn how to read what they post.
Understand that they no longer provide their readers with all the information needed to reach their own conclusions. Media (news and social) is all about political activism, the content is curated and presented more to make you FEEL than to help you LEARN.
It’s no longer beneficial to point that out, or complain about it, what matters now is learning to live effectively in this garbage environment. That means re-learning how to read.
The Houston CBS news affiliate retweeted this. Serious tone, asking you to read and then take time to “process”. Very few ICU beds left in the Houston area, worse than ever in this pandemic. Sure, that last sentence is a comfort about surge capacity, but the primary message is that this is DEEPLY concerning.
OK, I want to verify this, and I know that SETRAC.ORG provides lots of data about Southeast Texas hospitals, and I can even filter to just Harris County.
I’ll pull up a chart for the entire duration of the covid era – March 2020 to now – just Harris County, ICU bed usage. The chart shows Covid beds in use, total beds in use, regular bed capacity, and surge bed capacity. This is the information I need in order to get a real idea of what is going on.
So, here’s what I see
- 26.7% of ICU beds are Covid beds, that’s a lot, but it was worse in February and last August
- Total beds in use is approaching the “operational” number, like it did at this time last year
- ICU beds has been running close to capacity for a year, and the number of operational beds never increased
- ICU beds are expensive to maintain in “operational” state, spare capacity is wasted money
Bottom line, yes, there is a surge in need happening, but it’s not time to really be alarmed. It’s fairly normal at this time of year, and the region and state are well able to handle it.
So no need to get emotional about that tweet, and certainly no need to retweet it or scare anyone else.
We all need to get much better at getting more information before we just react.