| India: yes. The UK: in local areas, patients had to be diverted sometimes hundreds of miles to a hospital with space. all non emergency hospital care was stopped, and some emergency routine care was delayed. Belgium was overwhelmed. The issue is this, we can't just not admit the over 60s. even if we did, that would only free up 50% capacity (ie you could go one more cycle of exponential growth, doubling every n weeks/days)[source https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=...] filling hospitals means that the resources used to treat both sudden hospitalizations and long term are diverted. so car accident/drinking/heavy sports/DIY injuries have worse outcomes, and cancer outcomes drop off a cliff. if the UK manages to keep the total number of patients in hospital with covid to less than 7-10k that would be a brilliant outcome for winter. we are currently at ~6k, and its still summer. The issue is there are not enough trained doctors and nurses. They take at least 8 years to train. that's the main constraint. Suitable beds can be made up in a number of weeks (see china and the "nightinggale hospitals") but if there is no staff, they are pointless |
I'm not sure a big percent- of people is prone to hard covid. I tend to believe the majority of people has already went through it asymptomatically/easily and so will the majority of those who still hasn't.
Exponential growth in positive tests doesn't imply infinite (limited only by the size of the population itself) exponential growth of severe cases or deaths.