Given a virus that requires hospitalization at a certain rate, there is a certain point where the hospitals end up overrun for all other activities.
In an effort to stave off that danger, local governments enacted lockdowns with the intent of reducing the spread of the virus.
The virus, in the United States, has an established death rate of around 1.5% and a hospitalization rate higher than that.
It also experiences exponential growth.
Our hospitals didn't have the capacity to handle all the _potential_ load; and, once they're approaching that capacity, it's already too late and they'll blow past it. That's the danger of exponential growth.
Let's imagine doublings:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128.
If total capacity is 100, the moment that capacity is less than 20% used up, we're 2-3 timesteps away from using over 100%. It is a very dangerous gamble, and controversial decisions are made or not made and the worst part is that, when you do the safe thing, you have no way of being certain or explaining that the bad thing would have or could have happened, because "it's only 20%" and that looks small.
No, you were. Please stop spreading misinformation about a serious subject. You appear to have confused case fatality rate with the population infection fatality rate. CFR is largely meaningless because so many infections are never counted. Look at the results from antibody seroprevalence studies.
Federally, there was no strategy because federal powers were devoted to promoting the pandemic (e.g., via the Defense Production Act invocation to shield the meat packing industry from state safety efforts) rather than fighting it.
OTOH, hospitals also require skilled staff, which takes longer to build.
So you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources?
> So you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources?
Absolutely. Steve the UberEats delivery driver can be moved into the ICU, putting folks on ventilators and providing critical care in a week or so, right?
And Gustavo, the busboy can be out providing EMT services in just a few days, right?
A doctor requires 8+ years of post-secondary education, in addition to several years of on-the-job training.
An RN requires at least 6+ years of post-secondary education, plus several years of on-the-job training. LPNs even longer.
So, yes. In the short term (~6-18 months), staff are most certainly fairly fixed resources.
As for hospital beds, those are limited to the square footage available for them. Sure, temporary hospital wards can be constructed and put in place fairly quickly, but unless Steve and Gustavo are staffing them, you still have a big problem.
This is just throwing your arms up in the air and saying it's unsolvable.
I don't give up. Make a temporary hospital with ip web cams pointed at all the vitals. Build a quick and dirty dashboard that lets doctors/nurses monitor dozens of patients at once instead of having to physically walk around everywhere. If engineers can get more done with less using automation, medical professionals can do it too.
In an emergency situation, you make do. Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional. You can hire a bunch of boy scouts to do the repetitive stuff, and have them call in a real doctor or nurse if symptom progression isn't matching their training.
I don't see how that would be a reason to stop the lockdowns. Remember that there is a severe respiratory contagion going around that spreads from breathing the same air as infected folks.
Heart disease and cancer combined kill four times as many people every year, than what covid-19 has done this year.
About 10% of all the people who died in the US this year will have died from covid-19. Why are those 10% of deaths so much more terrible, so unimaginably horrible, that we're focusing exclusively on those, and completely ignoring the remaining 90% of deaths?
Because it's an infectious disease spread through droplets in the air; because it's abnormal and therefore new and scary; and because it's more deadly than our other regular disease, the seasonal flu.
Tell that to the family that lost their job and is now homeless. Tell that to the people who've lost love ones to suicide, overdose, alcoholism. (see I can be snarky and unhelpful, too)
The broader point is that it's not clear that lockdowns are beneficial or necessary. They have real costs. Nobody is talking about how we weigh those costs and benefits. And despite the lockdowns, California still has a swamped medical system.
To move the conversation forward: people will never give up their sacred cows. The lockdowns were never about COVID, they're about control and rewarding political allies. Texas tried to ban abortion. California tried to ban religion. And nobody cares if the lockdowns work or not.
The lockdowns were more essential than the stimulus payments, though no sane government would fail to do both in the circumstances.
(Our government failed on both the lockdowns, which were scattered, too late in many places, and too poorly enforced in most places, and stimulus, but then our government, at many levels, has not been sane.)
In an effort to stave off that danger, local governments enacted lockdowns with the intent of reducing the spread of the virus.
The virus, in the United States, has an established death rate of around 1.5% and a hospitalization rate higher than that.
It also experiences exponential growth.
Our hospitals didn't have the capacity to handle all the _potential_ load; and, once they're approaching that capacity, it's already too late and they'll blow past it. That's the danger of exponential growth.
Let's imagine doublings:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128.
If total capacity is 100, the moment that capacity is less than 20% used up, we're 2-3 timesteps away from using over 100%. It is a very dangerous gamble, and controversial decisions are made or not made and the worst part is that, when you do the safe thing, you have no way of being certain or explaining that the bad thing would have or could have happened, because "it's only 20%" and that looks small.