Hospitals and related services are optimized for efficiency, not flexibility. They don't like having empty beds that aren't being used, or idle workforces. So when something out of the ordinary happens they can't deal with it while maintaining their normal level of service. As a society we don't seem to want to pay for idle capacity. Human nature, I guess. We could have been building more hospitals over the last year, training more nurses, etc. But that doesn't appear to have happened.

I too saw the widely-circulated picture of the "open graves" in NYC. Somehow they forgot to mention it was just a regular picture of a pauper's graveyard. Funny what fear can be provoked by context-free visual imagery.

> where they had refrigerated trucks full of bodies because their morgues were full

Is that really true though? Because what the headlines of these kinds of stories say vs. what the article itself says usually never match.

It’s kind of true. These refrigerated trucks were on standby anyway because they are needed every time there’s a bad flu season.

And that is what I found for almost all articles of that type. If you read into the article it was never “this is happening” but “we are getting prepared”.

I live in NYC and have a friend in the funeral business. This was absolutely true in the beginning of the pandemic, although perhaps not at every hospital in the city as some were hit harder with patients than others. There was also a backlog in the ability to process bodies (e.g. Getting death certificates, funerals, burial sites or cremations).

While the overall death rate isn't up that much, I've heard that it's clustering a lot more, which means various systems are overwhelmed: We can process X bodies per day but we have a couple weeks where we're getting 1.5X bodies, and so for a while we have a few bodies in refrigerated trucks or other overflow systems.

So... it's sort of true, but it's more of a congestion issue (like rush hour traffic), not a sign of systemic collapse.

Heard from where? Got any numbers for this "clustering"?

I mean it kinda makes sense. Since the beginning we’ve lumped entire continents as a group to compare to another group. When instead this stuff is incredibly hyper localized. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard “the experts” say this.