The entire reason for the collapses of various health-care systems in the first place is not because the virus is particularly worse compared to previous bad viruses.
The reason is that our health-care systems spent the last 30 years being "optimized" to make sure the extra bed capacity is as close to 0 as possible.
Italy didn't get fucked in early 2020 because of Covid. They got fucked because they had 3 times less hospital beds per capita then in 1970.
Those beds weren't there because people in the 60s were stupid. They were there because people were prepared for emergencies. Which you have to be if you don't want to get fucked when the emergency happens.
The thing that blows my mind is how all of this did not become a motivation to rethink the decision of maximizing hospital profits. Instead of returning to a rational emergency preparedness, we decided to go with voodoo bullshit lockdowns and masks, which don't do anything in except make hamsters NPCs feel safer.
The other thing is that hospital bed usage and occupancy is apples and oranges comparing the 1970s to the 2020s.
They had 3 times as many hospital beds and their patient census was mostly relatively short-term admissions like surgeries, broken bones, heart attacks, births, etc. IE Relatively straightforward problems with clear fixes.
Now we have a third of the bed capacity, but what capacity we do have is constantly and indefinitely blocked by the elderly, the demented, the obese, the poor, the homeless, criminals, addicts and social admits with no place to go.
Italy didn't get fucked in early 2020 because of Covid. They got fucked because they had 3 times less hospital beds per capita then in 1970.
If you look at the numbers of beds, most of the world followed the same formula, reduction of beds. The US, Russia, UK (that I've looked at) all reduced their number of beds during this same time. Covid may be stressing the current system, but the stress is there because of 3 - 4 decades of consistent reduction in the number of beds.
The thing no one is talking about:
The entire reason for the collapses of various health-care systems in the first place is not because the virus is particularly worse compared to previous bad viruses.
The reason is that our health-care systems spent the last 30 years being "optimized" to make sure the extra bed capacity is as close to 0 as possible.
Italy didn't get fucked in early 2020 because of Covid. They got fucked because they had 3 times less hospital beds per capita then in 1970.
Those beds weren't there because people in the 60s were stupid. They were there because people were prepared for emergencies. Which you have to be if you don't want to get fucked when the emergency happens.
The thing that blows my mind is how all of this did not become a motivation to rethink the decision of maximizing hospital profits. Instead of returning to a rational emergency preparedness, we decided to go with voodoo bullshit lockdowns and masks, which don't do anything in except make hamsters NPCs feel safer.
The other thing is that hospital bed usage and occupancy is apples and oranges comparing the 1970s to the 2020s.
They had 3 times as many hospital beds and their patient census was mostly relatively short-term admissions like surgeries, broken bones, heart attacks, births, etc. IE Relatively straightforward problems with clear fixes.
Now we have a third of the bed capacity, but what capacity we do have is constantly and indefinitely blocked by the elderly, the demented, the obese, the poor, the homeless, criminals, addicts and social admits with no place to go.
If you look at the numbers of beds, most of the world followed the same formula, reduction of beds. The US, Russia, UK (that I've looked at) all reduced their number of beds during this same time. Covid may be stressing the current system, but the stress is there because of 3 - 4 decades of consistent reduction in the number of beds.
I mean, the system is explicitly created to have 0 overhead and be completely vulnerable to the slightest amount of stress.