Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fight coronavirus

Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by jdminhbg on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:04AM (#23027314)

It seems to be the strategy in the sense smashing a window with a hammer is a strategy to kill a fly. Hospitals are so empty that workers are being furloughed, say nothing about the unused field hospitals and naval ships. The Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table.

Edit: I should add that I didn’t downvote.

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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by nomel on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:12AM (#23027352)

Many positions at a hospital aren't related to treating someone with coronavirus. For example, elective and non-time-sensitive surgical departments should have nothing to do right now.

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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by jdminhbg on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:15AM (#23027372)

The ICUs aren’t even close to full, and indefinite delays of non-emergency care also has real consequences.

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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by nomel on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:59AM (#23027585)

There are only about 7,300 ICU beds in California [1]. If we're at 20%, that's only about two doublings before people start being rejected for care. In March, we were seeing a doubling every few days, with ICU requirements following [2].

I'm not disagreeing that we need to let people be infected if we want to achieve herd immunity, but I think it's a tough choice in deciding which portion of the population you put out to partially die, since letting everyone out at once will result in some high R0 value again, and a vaccine may be on the way. These politicians are in a lose-lose situation here. Anything they do will result in someone being harmed.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida...

[2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-gov-newso...

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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by briandear on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:22AM (#23027419)

And people are dying from other causes while we sit and wait.

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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by davidw on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:13AM (#23027357)

> Lombardy scenario does not appear to be on the table.

It already happened in New York. Maybe not quite at exactly the the same scale, but it looked like it was pretty awful just the same.

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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by jdminhbg on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:17AM (#23027382)

The scale is kind of the entire point. The logic behind Flatten The Curve is preventing excess deaths that result from a collapsed health care system. Even NY, which was literally sending covid-positive patients back into nursing homes, didn’t get there.

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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by davidw on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:22AM (#23027420)

They were doing similar kinds of triage, from what I can tell: https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/were-bringing-covid-19-patient...

NYC has had 12,774 deaths to date, out of 9 million people or so.

Lombardy has had 13,679 deaths with a total population of around 10 million.

So broadly, they're fairly similar, although Lombardy as a region is much larger than NYC.

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