How long does it take the army to train a field medic? (Serious question, I don't know if there's some extended training involved, I just assume it's far less than, say, a nursing degree.)

I think that training people to handle 90% of the issues you see in Covid-related illnesses could be done relatively quickly, if we wanted to do that. The ICU bed shortage really refers to a ICU-staff shortage, and anything we could do to relieve that burden would be a good thing.

The US Army takes 16 weeks to train a field medic. However most of that training isn't applicable to treating COVID-19 patients.

So does developing a vaccine usually. We should be taking extraordinary measure not saying "oh that will take too long don't even start"

Assigning ten teachers to a student won't make the student learn ten times as fast.

Modifying the procedures and allowing people to work before they're through arbitrary redtape does. The EUA the vaccine received is the same concept. The reason the vaccine was developed faster wasn't just the number of scientists working on it, but the amount of funding directed towards it. Increasing money to education programs would increase the amount of people they can train, allow for further optimizations to be developed etc.

Thousands of ICU nurses quit on the past few years. They are still trained and would just have to be convinced to return.

I have a suspicion that ICU training for a COVID specific nurse could be much shorter - if there were any will or basic common fucking sense among policy makers, and if there were fewer people making excuses for those who ghoulishly and cynically privatized healthcare for profit across the Western world.

A "COVID specific nurse" still needs the entire slate of training that goes with respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, etc, and all the secondary complications that come from those.

Then train 3 nurses in respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, and secondary complications separately. Put them under an experienced nurse, and incentivize them to add to their skills when they're not working.

Look at the sheer difference in numbers of healthcare professionals between America and Cuba. If they can do it even after decades of cruel and unusual sanctions, we sure as fuck can too.

Well, mistakes by ICU personnel can easily kill - and that's on top of a significant, often >50% death chance for covid ICU patients. Better make sure the people don't get as far as getting intensive care in the first place.