Anti-vax Tri-Citians should take note. Idaho’s lax COVID strategy is a disaster

Tri-Citians embracing their “constitutional rights” not to wear a mask or get a COVID-19 vaccine should take a good, hard look at what is happening next door in Idaho.

The situation there is horrendous.

From the start of the pandemic, Idaho has had one of the most lax COVID strategies in the country, with few restrictions and no statewide mask mandate.

When officials at the city and county level tried to impose their own local mask policies, community opposition was fierce and ugly.

The Idaho cry for individual freedom has been just too strong, and it has drowned out pleas to consider your neighbor. So for months Idaho Gov. Brad Little left it up to citizens to do the right thing.

As it turns out, that plan simply didn’t work.

With a deadly combination of low vaccination rates and the highly transmittable Delta variant, unvaccinated COVID patients have overwhelmed hospitals to the point that, on Thursday, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare activated crisis standards of care for the entire state.

That means hospital patients now must be ranked by priority.

Under normal circumstances, people most in need of medical care are treated first. Under crisis standards, treatment is given to those most likely to survive.

In addition, if there is a shortage of ventilators then adult hospital patients are supposed to receive “aggressive interventions,” but there should be no attempts at resuscitation if there’s a cardiac arrest, according to the Idaho state health department.

However, such a decision will be made on a hospital-by-hospital basis.

Scott McIntosh, Opinion editor for the Idaho Statesman, wrote, “In other words, whether we’ve signed a ‘do not resuscitate’ directive or not, every single one of us could be under a DNR directive in Idaho ... This is just one example of how the decision to not wear a mask and not get a COVID-19 vaccine is more than just an individual choice.”

One longtime Tri-City leader recently experienced first-hand the mess in Idaho, but fortunately it was before the crisis standards were implemented.

Bob Ferguson, 88, was the deputy assistant secretary of nuclear programs for the Department of Energy, the chief executive for the Washington Public Power Supply System. He was vacationing several weeks ago in Northern Idaho when he suffered a stroke and spent two days in a hospital’s emergency room waiting for an ICU bed.

Once space was found, Ferguson had to share the room and a monitor with another patient. He had no call button for a nurse, and his daughters told the Herald they helped bathe, feed and care for him because overworked nurses were busy caring for others.

The daughters also said they were told that the beds in the intensive care unit were filled with COVID-19 patients, almost all of whom were not vaccinated against the virus.

Ferguson’s experience is an example of how unvaccinated COVID patients are affecting other people who need hospital care.

Under crisis standards, all people will be prioritized the same way whether or not they have had the COVID shot, according to the Idaho Statesman.

Here is how hospital staff will prioritize patients:

1. Children up through age 17.

2. Pregnant women with a viable pregnancy, at more than 28 weeks of gestation.

3. Adults by age, from younger to older: age 18-40, age 41-60, age 61-75 and 76 and older.

4. Patients who “perform tasks that are vital to the public health response of the crisis at hand, including, but not limited to, those whose work directly supports the provision of acute care to others.”

5. A lottery, or “random allocation,” if there is still a tie after going through the first four priority criteria.

What a sad, gut-wrenching system.

Hospitals in Washington state are taking Idaho patients when they can, but our nurses and doctors are overwhelmed too. At what point will it all be too much?

People complain about Washington’s strict mask and vaccine mandates, but the reality is that doing nothing leads to a health care disaster.

This story was originally published September 17, 2021 at 12:51 PM.