So, they were not overwhelmed?

Completing 12 hour shifts without a moments break isn’t overwhelmed?

Read this article about two of the nurses in NY that committed suicide due to the stress of watching patients die and not having the resources to help them, then tell me those people were not overwhelmed.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/28/emts-a28.html

Waving people's deaths around like this is crass and offensive. It's very sad that these nurses died, but when people say "overwhelmed" in this context they mean that people cannot obtain healthcare.

> when people say "overwhelmed" in this context they mean that people cannot obtain healthcare.

The “no non-COVID patients” part didn't happen because suddenly no one needed ICU care or other hospitalization for non-COVID reasons, it happened because people were systematically excluded starting with methods from soft (discouragement to seek care) to hard (bans on classes of procedures, triage prioritization, etc.) from hospital care for non-COVID reasons.

Hospitals in and around NYC were, like those in Italy at the peak of the crisis, using criteria beyond medical need to allocate ventilators because medical need exceeded supply. That's overwhelmed, and ant standard which suggests it isn't is a dumbass standard.

Oh I see, the human cost to health care workers doesn’t count. Got it.

Maybe your threshold for what counts as ‘getting health care’ is different from mine. For me it amounts to more up than just being physically in a hospital. If the people described below were your family, would you be satisfied with their health care?

"Some of them, bless their souls, can't do anything for themselves," she said. "How can I take care of 14 people when I have one tech and they have 30 patients. It's so bad here you guys."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronaviru...

You know you're being dishonest here and I'm not going to engage.

That’s a real shame. I just don’t understand at all where you’re coming from, or in what way I’m being dishonest.

To me is seems straightforward to say that a system that is no longer able to provide an acceptable standard of care to a majority, or large minority if it’s patients, has been pushed beyond its capacity.

I’m under the impression that this is in fact what an overwhelmed health care system looks like. That the people in the system would rather die than continue being in it. This is also how we measure the despair of poverty.

That specific hospital wasn't. But, again:

> At the peak they needed about double the normal number of beds.

If they had not been able to annex a portion of the hospital for more beds, they probably would've been overwhelmed. Most of the people with normal things (heart attacks, severe diabetes-related issues, alcohol withdraw, etc.) stayed home, so they were able to create more capacity. I think every hospital did the same, so there's no good control group.

In the beginning of March Mayo Clinic circulated a COVID ICU protocol which virtually everybody implemented. Cleveland Clinic had something similar though NYC, Philadelphia and Baltimore hospital systems went with Mayo. It had metrics and trigger points at which point different units at hospitals were converted into COVID ICUs. Such protocols are absolutely standard for any large scale disaster scenarios. "Overwhelmed" means "handling of this event is not in a protocol". That has never happened. 2x the normal ICU beds was would not have triggered even the 2nd implementation of a second phase.

To me, overwhelmed means not able to provide the expected standard of care to a majority, or large minority of patients. In many cases the patient to nurse ratios went up to 3 or 4 times higher than would normally be considered acceptable, and patients dying before the nurses can even get to them. Simply having a bed isn’t enough.

That is an insane redefinition and goal post moving.

It is not. It is exactly the same as event one's AWS installation has a capacity problem. You do sort of have that plan, don't you?

If I attempt at AWS load balancing was “cut down all other services for the purpose of this particular services up to and including the full shut down of other services to divert to this service” I would definitely say this instance is wildly out of hand and an unacceptable state and that we may need to evaluate if this is temporary or if we need to grab more AWS $$$.

You just described the plan. That's exactly what it is.

This definition you have concocted isn't real. Just because everyone stops what they are doing and starts bailing water out of a boat doesn't mean the boat isn't flooded.

You can't hallucinate some new definition for being overwhelmed and then say New York hospitals weren't overwhelmed. That is not rational.