[IronRanger]

Then why are they not massively ramping up ICU capacity? Surely the 'cost' of doing that is less than the 'cost' of shutting down huge sections of society?

Why don't we have the same lockdowns when influenza threatens to overwhelm hospitals each year?

Where is the focus on public health interventions such as mass Vitamin D, Vitamin C, Zinc supplemenation, as well as seriously dealing with obesity (banning or taxing added sugar) and air pollution (banning or taxing coal and oil)?

[ht_th]

> Then why are they not massively ramping up ICU capacity?

Because you cannot. Even if you have the space and the materials, you do not have the qualified and experienced personel to run it.

[jrnichols]

> Because you cannot. Even if you have the space and the materials, you do not have the qualified and experienced personel to run it.

Oh yes you do. Absolutely. They're called traveler nurses and there are literally thousands of them out there. Agencies like Krucial Staffing have been hiring hundreds of them at a time and sending them to places like El Paso. Which now has a declining ICU admission rate.

If they said "We need 500 ICU nurses to be in California within 48 hours" they would have them.

Whether or not the big union in California would let this happen, however, is another story in itself.

But yes, you absolutely can get people to staff it.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Even if we have enough nurses, we also need more doctors, respiratory therapists, and so on...

At some point in a wave, the number of ICU beds used across the US would be greater than the number of professionals available even if they moved to other hot spots when they could. It's a good idea to stay as far away from that point as we can, especially if we're unsure about the rate of spread in the winter/flu season.

[DanBC]

> Why don't we have the same lockdowns when influenza threatens to overwhelm hospitals each year?

People keep making comparisons to flu, so it's useful to talk a bit about how covid-19 is much more lethal than flu.

I know the numbers for the UK. Official numbers for flu are about 10,000 to 20,000 deaths each year. Official numbers for covid-19 are currently about 60,000.

Already we can see covid-19 is much more lethal. But this ignores differences in counting.

If we count flu using the same methods we're currently using for covid we see only a couple of hundred, fewer than 1000, deaths to flu each year.

If we count covid using the same methods we use to count flu deaths we'd see at least 140,000 covid deaths.

> Where is the focus on public health interventions

We have internationally coordinated programmes of work to monitor which flu strains are active, then develop vaccines to target these, then to vaccinate as many vulnerable people as possible.