[theli0nheart]

I am a parent of young children, and we probably have more reason to feel "over it" than other folks. I spent the first two weeks of this year balancing full-time work with a kid at home because he tested positive. I got a fever for about a day, but that was it. But the disruption to my work and his education was far worse than any alternative. The entire class ended up getting sick with COVID anyways.

We were triple-vaccinated. Our kid had his first shot in early December. We spent basically all of December in lockdown. All of the little one's playdates were cancelled because everyone was freaking out about Omicron. And we still got sick. What was the point?

I'm absolutely done with the lockdowns, the masks, the strict controls, etc. The older people in my life are sick of it as well; they don't know how many years they have to live, and they don't want to spend the rest of their lives holed up inside a building. We have lives to live.

Hopefully, we as a race start taking into account quality of life in addition to length of life. We have a looming mental health crisis on our hands and it's exactly because of the fear-mongering; who knows how many years we're going to have to spend cleaning up this mess (it will probably be decades).

If you haven't gotten sick from COVID yet, you probably will. At this point it really is just a virus. The time for pulling out all the stops to prevent ICU overflows is over. This might be a permanant fixture in our lives and I'm more sick of the constant fear-setting than I am from the virus itself.

[eli]

I believe a higher percentage of ICU beds are occupied nationally than at any point in the pandemic: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend

If ICU overflows are when we pull out all of the stops, can we pull out just some of the stops before it gets that dire?

It's already not great. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/overwhelmed-by-omicron-surg...

[theli0nheart]

> I believe a higher percentage of ICU beds are occupied nationally than at any point in the pandemic

According to the data you linked:

   COVID ICU Beds Occupied:

   January 17-23, 2022 : 26,236
   January 4-10, 2021  : 29,175

So there were 2,939 (or ~11%) more beds occupied due to COVID about a year ago.

[eli]

Sure but that's not what I said. A higher percentage of all ICU beds are occupied today than at any point on the graph. If you need an ICU bed and one isn't available, you probably don't really care if that's because too many covid patients or reduced ICU capacity or a shortage of nurses.

In any event, would you agree that hospitals cancelling elective surgeries is indicative of an overworked system?