by Most Lee Harmless » Tue Nov 24, 2020 2:10 pm
If you have 20 intensive care beds and 19 patients then no, it is not that deadly.
If you have 20 intensive care beds and 119 patients then yes, it is rather deadly.
By keeping infection rates down we keep infected cases down and within our means to treat them with a high degree of success.
Once our medical facilities are overwhelmed then we is ferked. Not just for covid cases but for all the other life-threatening illnesses. No empty ICU beds is kinda problematic for cardiac cases too. A lack of ventilators is problematic for those with breathing disorders no matter the cause. A shortage of nursing staff due to covid cases being dealt with impacts on all other care needs, some of which are also life-threatening.
There is a blog from a NY paramedic chief. Apart from the strain placed on the whole service dealing with covid cases, they still had to deal with all their usual ranges of cases. It is quite clear that the policy they had to adopt, of long shifts and working rest days, is not sustainable over weeks, never mind months or a year.
Medical services may have a degree of slack built in, you can juggle beds, cancel surgeries, overwork staff. But once you tip over that point of absolute capacity, then the death rate increase will not be linear, it will be exponential.
So, if that day ever comes, as you wait twelve hours for an ambulance, as you sit in the waiting room, or lie on a trolley in a corridor, as a stressed out nurse knows there is no ventilator to put you on, no bed to put you in and no doctor free to aid you. Well maybe wearing a mask was no big deal after all.
-1 : Move to archive.