The other victims of the anti-vaxx movement
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For a purely personal consumer choice, deciding not to get vaccinated sure seems to consume a lot of scarce resources:
Joel Valdez isn’t in the hospital for covid-19, but he’s feeling its effect.
For 10 days, Valdez has been in a hospital bed at Ben Taub Hospital in Houston awaiting surgery after he was shot six times outside a grocery store asan unlucky bystander to a domestic dispute.
“Having broken bones and bullets in me for over a week now, it’s a little frustrating,” Valdez told KRIV over the weekend.
He tallied his injuries, which include a neck wound and three gunshot wounds to a left shoulder that’s in need of surgery: “Everybody is really surprised I’m still in this bed a week later.”
Valdez confirmed Monday afternoon he was still awaiting surgery when contacted by The Washington Post, but declined to be interviewed on the record.
At Ben Taub Hospital where Valdez is awaiting surgery, the intensive care unit was at 103 percent capacity as of Monday morning, with 33 percent of those cases related to covid-19, a spokesperson for Harris Health System told The Post. Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, the other public hospital in the Harris Health System, remains similarly stretched at 94 percent ICU capacity, with 54 percent of those cases covid-related.
The term “elective” surgery has come to connote “trivial,” as if every elective surgery was minor cosmetic procedures. But this is radically false. Many “elective” surgeries are for very serious health problems that just aren’t immediately life-threatening. And COVID going uncontrolled means a lot of them not being performed.