I know many nurses and doctors who work at hospitals in and around the NYC tristate area -- they all say capacity is well under the normal rates for them.

Note: last April (2020), they said it had exploded due to COVID-19.

Yeah, the main difference appears to be states that have high vaccine participation and states that don't.

This is just your bias showing, nothing more. COVID has been shown to be seasonal and to hit different parts of the world at different times of the year. Southern states appear to get hardest hit in the summer, while the colder Northern states are harder-hit in the winter.

Florida has the second-oldest population in the U.S., but it's death rate per 100,000 is average among the states. NYC and NJ are two states with the highest death rate per 100,000.

So what is there to say about Israel or Gibraltar?

Both have very high hospitalization rates. Both also have very high vaccination rates.

IDK, hard to say what's going on there.

In the worst case, it may just been that the vaccine effectiveness wanes over time.

What is a covid patient? One that tested positive and is in the hospital for something else? Or one that is actually sick from covid? Because absolutely none of these articles I read clarify that tidbit and it is very important.

Positive covid tests require a hell of a lot more hospital overhead to deal with, even if they don’t have symptoms and are in for something else. It could very well be the case that this is a self made problem. We very well could be artificially overloading hospitals because we dictate that every positive test, regardless of symptoms, invokes massive overhead.

And again, every article I read never clarifies this. In fact many conflate “people with covid but there for something else” and “people sick with covid”.

I am fully inclined to believe that this hospital shortage is a self inflicted problem. If this was literally a hospital full of people choking on their own ooze, the media would be all over it like moths to a flame.

> What is a covid patient? One that tested positive and is in the hospital for something else? Or one that is actually sick from covid? Because absolutely none of these articles I read clarify that tidbit and it is very important.

The stories on the reddits I suggested are all pretty much the same. Patient comes in struggling to breath, tests positive for covid, ends up with blood clots or pneumonia which pushes them into the ICU.

Here's just one of many stories of burnout [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/p9ps06/the_burn_ou...

Those are anecdotes not data.

Clearly.

> So, the anecdotal evidence would be...

I'm not trying to represent it as anything other than that.