[nafix]

Thank you. I've also been trying to get this across to other people as well. And here's the worst part. If and when another high-spread virus emerges in the future, there will not be a vaccine available at the beginning, which is also when hospital overwhelming is most critical. So we will be in the exact same situation. I can't believe no one is talking about improving the hospital infrastructure to handle the inevitable next virus. Are there things happening in this regard and I am just out of the loop?

[daveoc64]

Having enough excess capacity in healthcare systems to cope with potential future pandemics is too expensive. You'd need a lot more medical staff, plus more equipment and hospital bed capacity.

There would be a perception for a lot of the time that the cost of all of these things is wasteful - whether you're talking about public or private healthcare.

Not being able to say when the next pandemic might occur is going to make it a hard sell - how do you tell taxpayers or shareholders that you need to keep extra staff on retainer for something that may not happen for 100 years?

If you put these extra staff to use on other types of (non-essential) healthcare, then you're going to have to cancel all of that when the next pandemic happens. That will then lead to backlogs as operations are cancelled, screening isn't carried out etc. - and you're back to healthcare having to shut down.

Also, what do you plan for? Not every pandemic is the same.