I suspect the limiting factor is personnel, not beds (i.e. trained staff to manage covid patients), which can't be increased on short notice. But still -- we have incompetent state & federal leadership that basically knew what would happen yet still didn't do enough to prepare.
> Instead hospitals were laying off people in the summer.
Yup. One of the dark ironies of this whole mess has been that hospitals have been letting go of staff because they had to suspend (very profitable) elective surgeries to treat (not so profitable) covid patients. Think hip surgeries being postponed and bleeding hospitals dry as a result.
i think the 3-6 months that we had would have been enough to train any MD to care for a covid patient, at least for majority of cases and under supervision of existing high specialist. My understanding is that non-covid personnel had their workload significantly decreased, so they could have been trained for covid for the second wave.
You might be right -- at this point, with everything that's gone wrong at the govt level, I'm pretty willing to accept rank incompetence as an explanation.
There are multiple points of failure. Pretending everything was A-OK is the largest one, failing to identify the virus's presence in the country for months was another, denying and downplaying the usefulness of masks was another, underfunding hospitals was another, failing to secure PPE was another, making it painfully difficult to get tested was another. There's a lot of blame to go around on this one. But reopening the economy was the biggest mistake.
> Instead hospitals were laying off people in the summer.
Yup. One of the dark ironies of this whole mess has been that hospitals have been letting go of staff because they had to suspend (very profitable) elective surgeries to treat (not so profitable) covid patients. Think hip surgeries being postponed and bleeding hospitals dry as a result.