A couple years before the pandemic, the counties neighboring mine (where I lived at the time) cut out most public medical services (mind you, these aren't free, just publicly funded, people still paid for them). There wasn't enough money for a private hospital to bother so this was a critical piece of infrastructure. They kept emergency and urgent care clinics in each county, but directed people to the other (more populated, higher income) counties like mine for many services. Last year was not a good year for those counties as people were now being shuttled 40+ miles if they needed to be treated (at a hospital) for COVID.

Lean means cutting the fat, not the meat. They didn't just cut the fat and meat, they cut to the bone. This is when organizations find themselves in trouble and fail their clients/customers: eliminating things they don't think they need because they're "underutilized", only to discover later there was a sound reason to have that capability to begin with.

I will upvote you just for coming up with this illustration. This should be useful for future reference.

That plan has now been effectively scrapped. The large number of ICU beds per capita has been one of the main reasons why Germany got so well through the first wave. The plan also overlooked that the main bottleneck has always been staff, who were already running with very low slack.

Although, the effects start showing after the optimization makes people believe they can squeeze even more work. The initial optimized schedules create more slack than handcrafted ones.

There's been a lack of tolerance for that. We tend to feel that if our tax dollars are paying for someone, that someone had better be busy all day long. Politicians have made political capital from "cutting slack" in public services.

We need a cultural recognition that slack is good. And I doubt that's going to happen any time soon.

Firemen have lots of idle time? I think they play floorball for example (good for them to stay fit)

Politicians do like to turn things into moral issues, this is one of their favourites.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fly-early-arrive-on-tim...

"The best time to fly is between 6 and 7 in the morning. Flights scheduled to depart in that window arrived just 8.6 minutes late on average. Flights leaving before 6, or between 7 and 8, are nearly as good.

But delay times build from there. Through the rest of the morning and the afternoon, for every hour later you depart you can expect an extra minute of delays. Delay times peak at 20.7 minutes — more than twice as long as for early-morning flights — in the block between 6 and 7 p.m. They remain at 20-plus minutes through the 9 p.m. hour."

However, this means that there's a long tail of flights that get delayed an hour or more, which brings the average up. Not a good situation to be in if one has to make a late connection during the day.

I'm looking to avoid the one flight that's delayed an hour that means I miss my connection because my layover was an hour. Only 5 flights have to arrive on time to hit an average arrival delay of 10 minutes. Those are not favorable odds, as I see them. Especially if it's cutting into my vacation time.