[amalter]

ICUs are below occupancy, but hospitals even in the Midwest are declining to do elective procedures because they can’t get enough PPE to handle run of the mill stuff.

The US had been losing actual Hospital capacity every week, even with empty beds.

When those beds fill in wave 2, get ready to donate your rain ponchos and industrial garbage bags.

[mlyle]

Here's an interesting article. There's significant health care underutilization in the SF Bay Area due to preemptive cuts of elective procedures to prepare for a surge that didn't happen, and now health care workers are being cut:

https://abc7news.com/health/the-surge-that-never-came-leads-...

[mlyle]

PPE is a real issue-- I'm not arguing with that. I've been manufacturing a number of things at moderate quantity on my printer farm and cutting lasers.

On the other hand, a whole lot of measures seem to be consuming PPE at a fixed rate-- per personnel-day when COVID is present. That is, PPE usage is not strictly proportional with disease load, because the virus imposes a large fixed load.

[hackeraccount]

* everyone likes a disaster * you're doing a service by making everyone worried about what might happen - so you're helping that not happen * when it doesn't happen no one will call you on it anyway * better safe then sorry