[_3u10]

Exactly. In Canada, $40,000 per person was spent on lockdowns most of which went to large companies posting record profits. Zilch on making an ICU room for every Canadian which is what that money could have bought should it have been spent responsibly.

[bearjaws]

You understand that you can't just throw money and magically create doctors, ICU nurses, pharmacists, etc?

[JamisonM]

It is wild to me that people don't understand that with infinite funds spent the day the first wave hit the first fully qualified nurses that would be hitting the hospitals would just be arriving now at the earliest. And those wouldn't have spent a day on a ward or in an ICU yet... and you would be years away from more doctors. Not to mention physical infrastructure.. all the while the virus scales exponentially!

[_3u10]

That’s kind of exactly how it works. Why do you think people are dropping out of law school for coding boot camp?

Why do you think our hospitals are understaffed? It’s not because of the great pay of the Canadian system

[epgui]

I am prepared to believe this number, but I think a citation would be very helpful here. In any case, have you bothered to also look up the economic burden of disease of covid-19 in Canada, in terms of QALYs and/or DALYs?

[JamisonM]

The poster's assertion that none of the pandemic money was spent on increasing ICU capacity is false, capacities were increased in every province, in mine by about 35-40%.

That said you can't healthcare-capacity your way out of a pandemic, the USA has managed to overwhelm its capacity in numerous jurisdictions despite having much higher baseline capacity than any Canadian jurisdiction. It is not an honest argument worth engaging with.

[_3u10]

I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada. My assertion is honest. And you’ve provided no data / argument to refute it.

Not sure what province you are in but using the Canadian average and a 40% increase in beds, that’s roughly $50 million per bed. That is quite frankly a colossal waste of money. Do you feel that this is money well spent?

[JamisonM]

If you think that increasing hospital capacity scales infinitely with the money spent then I think your model of the healthcare system is incorrect and as such the premise of your question is incorrect.

Likewise if you think that the healthcare system capacity was the only limiting factor with respect to COVID-19 public health measures that reduced transmission your model of the epidemiology of SARS-Cov-2 is incorrect.

"I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada."

You didn't say that in the comment I replied to, maybe you said it elsewhere?

$40k per person in Canada is 37 million X 40,000 - that's 1.5 trillion CAD, right? Is my math correct on that? That's 2 years of the entire federal budget where did you get that number from?

[_3u10]

Not familiar with either of those acronyms.

It’s mentioned in Pierre Poliveres speech in parliament, here’s a link: https://youtu.be/cGbnjF3OdNQ

[shakna]

QALYs and DALYs are how you measure the burden of health.

Quality-Adjusted Life Years, and Disability Affected Life Years, respectively. Without an understanding of them, you can't actually have an objective conversation about measuring the impact of any kind of illness.

[_3u10]

It’s pretty easy. Mandating people get vaccinated for diseases they already had is the height of dumb. That’s what this protest is about, does the govt have the right to force your employer to fire you if you don’t get vaccinated for a disease you already have.

[epgui]

> Mandating people get vaccinated for diseases they already had is the height of dumb.

Why do you believe this? Do you assume there is no benefit to doing so? Or do you assume that the harms outweigh the benefits?

You'd be wrong on both counts. [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01676-0

[shakna]

Attempting to have a conversation about long distances whilst not learning the terms for either miles or kilometers is also dumb. You need to be able to talk in something more than allegory at some point.

The health impacts of vaccinated, and unvaccinated, have been measured according to current models. And in current models, getting the disease does not offer as much protection as also getting the vaccine - and thus protecting the wider population is best done with a mandate. A minuscule number of individuals is posing a threat to the rest of the population. The freedoms of the individual end where society begins. One doesn't get to walk down the street threatening to punch everyone they meet, even if they never throw a punch.

[epgui]

Without QALYs and DALYs, any comparison or weighing of dollars and health outcomes are meaningless. Wiki has enough to point you in the right general direction!