I think the point there is that the person clogged up an ICU bed for five weeks and will likely recover. Focussing on who will most likely die does not answer the who will overwhelm hospitals question. Increasing pressure in that sense will increase death rate even further amongst vulnerable (to dying from lack of ICU beds) populations.

Now I don't know if what is going on really makes sense or not, and I'm pretty happy to wait 6 months before I decide myself who should and shouldn't have done what - apart from the obvious stuff like the US CDC banning private companies from selling test kits has to be the stupidest crisis response I've seen in my lifetime. The reaction is going to look stupid in hindsight whatever happens, people were forced to make urgent decisions with lousy data.

All that said 'the hospitals are being overwhelmed' isn't a good reason to shut down most of the economy. If people are going to park up in their houses for months anyway there isn't much difference whether they are sick or not. I know a bunch of work-hungry lunatics who would much rather catch the disease, risk whatever may happen and get back to work and the data I've seen says it is debatable on whether that is the wrong approach for someone in their 30s or 40s. And on the flip side I don't think there has ever been an experiment like shutting everything down to see what happens. We have no idea if we are playing with fire or or a fluffy pillow for some of these decisions around shutting down industries. There is a correlation with bad economies and war breaking out. Does that happen when the economic wounds are self inflected in a crisis? We really don't know. Probably not. But things are happening very quickly and a lot of serious turbulence is hitting the system.

It is a fair observation and somewhat compelling but there needs to be a better reason than 'ICU nurses are overwhelmed with work' to strip people of their right to make their own mistakes. It is good evidence but it is not the end of the conversation.

> the US CDC banning private companies from selling test kits has to be the stupidest crisis response I've seen in my lifetime.

What happens when the kits are faulty or non-experts interpret the data? Lots of folks will think they're safe and go home to visit at-risk elders.

> All that said 'the hospitals are being overwhelmed' isn't a good reason to shut down most of the economy.

The hospitals are overwhelmed, so there will be no help for you when you need it. Any care that would have addressed accidents, infections, major medical emergencies will be under duress. People will die from preventable reasons.

> There is a correlation with bad economies and war breaking out.

This is outrageous to suggest.

> there needs to be a better reason than 'ICU nurses are overwhelmed with work' to strip people of their right to make their own mistakes.

Unfortunately when you get covid-19, you can spread it along and become part of an infection chain that leads to the deaths of others.

Do people have the right to drive under the influence?

> What happens when the kits are faulty or non-experts interpret the data? Lots of folks will think they're safe and go home to visit at-risk elders.

That is basically what the CDC did. Having one organisation in a position where a totally ordinary and probably routine failure will kill tens of thousands of people, or worse, is stupid. It isn't like government officials are the only people in the world who care about stopping a blossoming pandemic; the law shouldn't pretend otherwise.

Better to ban tests if there is something wrong with them than preemptivly screw up the response.

> The hospitals are overwhelmed

In our area, nurses have been furloughed because there is not enough going on at the hospitals and clinics to bill and thus pay for the staff.

Incidentally, they're not always even always overwhelmed. In the UK, where we were told initially that it was not even a question of if the NHS would be overwhelmed but how overwhelmed the NHS would be, hospitals are now operating with record high levels of capacity. There are as many free beds in the NHS today as there are people in beds. The 3,000 extra bed field hospital they built (one of six) has so far seen 19 patients.

Right because the whole country is basically shutdown and you “plan for the worst, hope for the best”.

Also looking at the NHS as a whole doesn’t tell the correct story as the virus right now is concentrated in a few hotspots.

It’s not nurses have too much work and are sad because they are overworked it’s that having no capacity means more people die because they can’t get the care they need whether they are Covid patients or a family who got in a car wreck.

> Anecdotal cases don't tell anything

It just did. Something rather important.