Yes but.. extraordinary times exist, if we were sane we would prepare for crises before they happen, because we always knew that it would hit us eventually, people have been warning about this for ages, this is not some black swan.
More healthcare capacity would help, just like more supply chain capacity would help, or the ability to manufacture some masks, the entire problem is we've been running on the idiotic 80s managerial efficiency mindset for decades and now we're running on fumes on every front.
If we had any appreciation for crisis management, robustness, redundancy and had some shock absorbers in our system many people would not have needed to die. And no it's not just the unvaccinated. Plenty of countries this year, including the US, will lose more people in total to covid in 2021 than in 2020. Vaccines help but they are not pandemic ending, and our systems are deeply screwed up.
this was entirely preventable by providing nurses and those keeping hospitals running with the support they need to do suchs jobs during a time of crisis.
In the netherlands for instance, many nurses have been running 12h shifts during the peaks, and there has been very little practical support in helping those people.
I am not even talking about monetary funds, but mainly practical stuff. (for instance, some volunteers decided to do grocery shopping for nurses during peaks).
If people are busting their ass off to prevent the healthcare systems from collepsing, maybe the goverment should have done far more in its power to prevent those people from quitting.
I really wonder if any of the people here talking about massively scaling up ICU capacity have ever even been in or visited someone in an ICU. It is called an “intensive care” unit for a reason. Extensive resources are required. Putting aside the physical space, equipment and pharmacological needs, the teams of people are specialized and have extensive knowledge and training.
You can't keep the staff and maintain the gear needed to handle 100x "once in a century" event all the time, it just doesn't work. Most health systems are already huge money sinks and on the brink of collapse in normal times... This isn't a "a bomb injured 300 people" event, we can't live 100% prepared to every single potential threats.
And the other thing you can do is, actually have a prepared and tested response plan to a crisis. Our reaction to this was to dust off some plans from the the shelves, every individual state had different systems in place, two years in we don't really have a functioning digital app, but ten different solutions none of which more than a fraction of people have adopted, and so forth. Completely avoidable chaos if anyone was actually in charge of readying the country for these situations.
A strategy that would make sense would include BOTH vaccination and ICU capacity, one of which could have been started in March 2020, and it would have put us in a much better position today. Letting capacity decrease while waiting for vaccines that may or may not end the pandemic is negligent. Not getting vaccinated may be seen by some as negligent also, but different standards apply for governments and citizens.
The pandemic comes in waves, we do not need to plan for endless exponential growth. A few weeks of extra capacity would make the whole thing much easier to handle, given that we might be already at the peak and cases seem to be going down again[0]. The RKI weekly report[1] currently lists 1700 ICU cases, a month ago it was 1100[2]. So the 4000 beds we lost throughout the year[3] could have made a big difference.
[0]https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rki-infektionen-103.html
[1]https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
[2]https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
[3]https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen
As I point out in my other comment, you cannot interpret that number in any to imply as though we ever actually had those 4,000 beds.
Just as with opposition to seatbelts it’s important for politics to create facts and just decide this issue. Everyone should be vaccinated and that’s just how it is.
Nothing more to say, our worldviews are too far apart.
There are many many reasons why one would or would not get a vaccine. For many, the reason was to go on vacation without too much hassle. Or because of social pressure. Or because they’re caring for someone who’s vulnerable.
If someone gets tested, uses masks properly and avoids groups of people they’re doing just as much as the average vaccinated. Definitely more than the truly antisocial which went into YOLO mode after getting vaccinated.
Yeah, there are issues with staffing and inadequate payment of the staff, sure, and those problems are long-standing and unresolved, but even if they were solved that wouldn’t be much of a help.
We would then maybe talk about a couple thousand (here in the literal sense) beds in terms of increasing ICU capacity, if that (simply because it’s not as though Germany’s existing ICU capacity is somehow ridiculously small, it’s quite large, actually if you put it in context and adding a couple thousand beds would be a massive increase). That would be helpful but wouldn’t really solve the underlying problem.
And either way: Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It’s completely misguided. Not least of which because it takes forever to increase capacity. You have to train people for that …
Unvaccinated people are to blame for this, but especially cowardly politicians who were too frightened to start implementing vaccination mandates right away (summer 2021), as soon as it was clear that you cannot reach good enough vaccination numbers just based on pleas alone.
We do have a solution for this and the solution is vaccination. However, in the very short term even that won’t be good enough, we need to break the 4th wave and for that contact reduction is necessary (and already happening).
Think about time frames.
Contact reduction, will show its effects within a couple weeks, vaccination mandates plus a logistical push for booster vaccinations, will show their effects within one month to three months, making healthcare more resilient in general, will show its effects within a couple of years, maybe a decade.