I've got personal experience with how COVID-related ICU capacity delays can result in death, in ways that aren't being counted now and might not ever be counted. Delaying diagnostic surgery to grade an invasive cancer by 3 months is more than enough time to allow for metastasis, and to turn a potentially treatable outcome into a rapidly terminal one.

What hurts me so much is that the delay I experienced was in February of last year, before we understood much of anything about COVID, vaccines weren't optimistically expected to happen for years, and hospitals were restricting capacity out of precaution as much as demand — national reported cases per day were under 100 in late February, compared to today, where they're over 160,000.

So much of this was mitigable, if not preventable. So many people have already suffered, been permanently injured, or died when the outcomes could've been better. In the United States we — collectively, societally, and systematically — failed to avoid any of it out of selfishness more than anything else.

Prior to covid, a family member started working at the local hospitals as an RN. I was surprised to learn how often hospitals would shut their doors and shed load to other ones during flu season. You never heard anything in the news about it.

In our state, it's not worse for icu and other beds than for any flu season.

Last year, a lot of 'elective' procedures in hospitals were cancelled, and medical staff not involved in treating covid were sent home to be safe. Our doctor pulled some strings to get a test done for us at the hospital, and we were shocked at how empty the hospital was. I'm sure the ICUs and IMCs were busy, but the rest of the place was a ghost town. This was around April of 2020. All I could think of was all those poor people who were having to forgo testing for cancer and other things, and would pay the price for the lockdowns in the future.

> a hospital in Alabama called 43 others across three states before finding a bed

I wonder how hard it would be to make an app that keeps track of which beds are available across the country, to avoid needing to make 43 phone calls.

It would be impossible because most hospitals don't have an API to check the number of available beds.

Hospitals need more authority not just to ration care, but should also be allowed to limit the number of beds available to unvaccinated COVID patients so that the general population is not turned away.

So why hasn't capacity been increased?

The number of beds a hospital is allowed to have is tightly controlled and staff are leaving or being fired. It's an entirely man-made crisis, and one that could be completely undone overnight if there was desire to.

Saying ‘leaving or being fired’ implies that those are happening at a comparable frequency. Staff are incredibly burnt-out because they’ve been in emergency mode for a year and a half. Hospitals can’t get enough staff.

Firings have been extremely limited, and have only really happened to frontline staff who refused to get vaccinated. It’s almost nothing in comparison.

Hospitals could certainly add more physical beds, but they don’t have the people to care for those patients. You can’t fix that overnight.

Maybe my understanding is incorrect but this is what I was referring to when I said the number of beds cannot be increased arbitrarily (have a limited time to post, sorry)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need

>A 2011 study found that CONs "reduce the number of beds at the typical hospital by 12 percent, on average, and the number of hospitals per 100,000 persons by 48 percent.

https://www.ajmc.com/view/ajmc_09oct_hellinger_737to744

>Certificate-of-need laws have reduced the number of hospital beds by about 10% and have reduced healthcare expenditures by almost 2%.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/con-certificate-of-need...

but also why haven't we empowered physicians to recommend other ways or reducing severity that requires hospitalization? Exercise, vitD, C, Zinc, etc? that hasn't been said anywhere and even if they don't "prevent" covid, they are definitely going to reduce the need to go to the hospitals from other things (incl if you catch covid)

its no longer covid doing this. its the general public who fail to understand the risks they are being told is their right to make.

plagues dont kill people, people kill people.