That "80-90%" might have been a thing before COVID, but now more and more facilities are running at capacity.

Even in Washington (70+% with one shot) and Seattle (83% one dose, 77% complete series) a number of hospitals are full enough to be cancelling elective surgeries again.

Interestingly enough, in Idaho, 92.3% of people over 65 have at least one dose.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

I live in South Carolina, where the pandemic is especially bad now, and where vaccine uptake has been low. A friend told me that ambulances were being turned away at the front door of a local hospital.

It is true that there are many possible factors for this, that planning at that hospital might have been questionable and/or very profit-oriented. Also, I've read that a lot of medical staff have gotten fed up with the situation, and in some cases quit their jobs.

But matter the underlying causes, it's a scary picture.

From the article: As of Tuesday Aug. 24, six states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas—had less than 10% of ICU beds available according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

I'm happy to hear Idaho is fine. It doesn't sound like these other states are.

Alabama: https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Scrolling through these, it still looks like only 20-30% are covid.

Arkansas: https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Mostly not being overrun, and again covid is only like 20-30%.

Florida: https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Similar to Alabama, and like Alabama, mostly not covid.

Georgia: https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Only a handful are out of beds, with the covid patients looking like an even smaller proportion, around 15-20% in most of them.

Mississippi - https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - Only the smallest hospitals are out of beds, with covid again looking like the 20-30% range for most of them.

Texas - https://data.commercialappeal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... - About half of them are on the high end; Texas looks like it's in much better shape than the other five states. Again covid cases are on the low end, 15-20%.

If there's something overrunning these hospitals, it's still most likely deferred treatments from last year. (Edit: And as the comment sibling to yours points out, they're currently doing elective surgeries that can probably be postponed to open up more capacity if really needed)

So why, in your opinion, are elective surgeries and deferred treatments only overrunning hospitals in states with lower vaccination rates? That's an especially strange assumption to make, given that said states also generally had the least restrictive lockdown measures from last year, meaning that if anything they would likely have fewer deferred treatments to perform now than states taking more intensive steps to halt the spread of the disease.

You also seem to think that somehow 20-30% of hospital beds being occupied solely by people sick with Covid is somehow not significant. Hospitals aren't designed to have so much capacity that they run on empty. Nor are they meant to be running at near max capacity at all times. But if a hospital is generally running on having 50-60% of beds occupied normally, and there is a surge like we've seen over the last 6 weeks that adds 20-30% on top of that solely because of Covid, then yes, its Covid that is causing hospitals to be overrun.

> in states with lower vaccination rates?

Come to think of it, two of those states aren't near the bottom, so that's also just wrong: Texas and Florida are around the halfway point when the states are ranked by vaccination rate, Texas just below and Florida just above. [0]

So yeah, I definitely think there's something else going on.

[0] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...