ICU load is now much lower for a given level of cases and barring new variants it will likely decrease further with boaster shots and more people recovered from infection and possible new therapeutics. Moderately increasing ICU capacity would be expensive but not vastly so. See "people in ventilator beds" in the link

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

> barring new variants

I didn't know this was an option. How do we go about doing it?

That's not what barring means. The statement is contingent on there not being new variants.

Which is, let's face it, extremely unlikely - and made even more so by the "laissez-faire" attitude.

If only there were some far less costly preventative measures that could be taken to limit COVID hospitalizations instead of building more ICU capacity…

why not? it seems absurd to think that at no point in the future will there be infectious endemic diseases.

hospital infrastructure hardly seems like the wrong thing to overbuild.

We already spend a lot on healthcare as it is, more so here in the USA than in countries with universal healthcare. Should we go from spending 17.7% of our GDP to 30%? Just because some people aren’t interested getting a vaccine?

The USA doesn't spend the amount it does on healthcare out of necessity, it does it because of graft. If we're willing to spend twice as much as everyone else for no reason, why not four times as much?

So? If healthcare needs rise, what is to assume that the graft won’t rise with it? The same people against vaccines are also against universal healthcare (at least in the states), so these problems will just keep being compounded.

Y'all had 1.6 years to do this. And no, the present ICU loads are not gonna be "the new normal".

Covid is here forever. We knew this way, way back in March of 2020. Only now are people finally getting the message. Life is short. We cannot play this game anymore. The time to go back to actual, 2019 pre pandemic normal is today.

I take your argument as “covid will be around forever so we should act like it doesn’t exist” which is nonsensical to me. I’m not sure I can come up with a more charitable interpretation: sometimes things change and societies need to adapt.

There is nothing unique or special about covid that requires society to adapt to some dystopian "new normal". There is nothing but fear that stops society from returning back to what life was like in 2019. Many places are completely over this already.

> Many places are completely over this already.

For example?

Florida has been open for awhile and Gov DeSantis is actively fighting measures that would require vaccine passports etc.

Florida ICUs are full, has a peak COVID death rate right now, and there isn't much end in sight.

https://www.local10.com/news/florida/2021/09/09/florida-adds...

How is that "a place where everything has returned to normal"? Ya, some people are ignoring COVID, but it isn't ignoring them.

If they don’t care, so what? What business of it is yours? Perhaps there is more to life than a myopic fixation on exactly one very specific illness.

By doing these mandates you are imposing your own values upon everybody else. For more than a year and a half! With no clear end goal! Indefinitely! Talk about selfish!

Your response is irrelevant to the query of “which many places are completely over this already?”.

Naming an individual United states state which clearly isn’t over it as one of the “many places” doesn’t really provide an answer.

Drive 20 miles outside any blue city and nobody cares.

Rural areas have been particularly hit hard. Wyoming ICUs are full up, for example.

https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/health/wyomings-cov...

It doesn't get any less blue than Wyoming (except for Jackson, but it isn't that big of a city).

Hell yeah we should have done it 20 years ago but now is the second best time.