I’m not sure what is the goal now? We have vaccines and ICUs are not getting filled. Yeah, Covid can be though for some but oh well… we also have alcholism, drug addiction, flu, mono, etc. We cannot solve all.
I guess we all need to come to realization that COVID is here to stay and everyone will be eventually exposed to it. Vaccinated or not.
Flatten the curve is still a thing, and hospitals are still under stress. While the fatality rate is lower, hospital care and especially ICU care is still running on fumes, largely thanks to a lack of health care workers, especially ICU trained nursing staff, at least here in Germany, and of course thanks to a higher infection rates which counteract the reduction of severe cases thanks to vaccines; we used to have more severe cases in fewer total infections but now we have fewer severe cases in more infections, which almost balances out at the moment here.
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations#hospitaliz...
Over those same 4 days, a significantly increasing number of the folks in those beds are testing positive with Covid, but it's not clear to me whether that is the reason they're in the ICU. The hospitals need to provide better data about the reason these patients were admitted.
The total occupied due to COVID is now 412 compared to 150 just a few weeks ago, where that old number had been the average for months.
edit: and more directly to your point
> the number of ICU beds in use in Ontario has been trending down over the last 4 days
The total number of occupied ICU beds has gone down because the number of non-COVID patients decreased. Not sure how that is relevant to our discussion.
Also:
""In ICU” numbers include people testing positive for COVID-19 and people who are in ICU for a COVID-19-related illness but have since tested negative."
It's not clear from the text that they are excluding people in the ICU with a positive test but are there for another reason.
Your expectations may be met soon enough. We're 800% higher in admits than we were 3 weeks ago. The total number of beds reducing up to 2 days ago looks more like a fluke than anything, a slight relief before the wave.
For what it's worth, I've been trying to find evidence of hospitals running out of ICU beds due to Omicron, but I'm not seeing it anywhere in North America, even in places that appear to have peaked. Staffing shortages due to quarantine policy seem to be a much bigger problem.
The vaccines really do seem to be working, and Ontario has a lot of vaccinated high risk folks compared to most US states.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/COVID-San-Francisco-s...
>Edit: Please with the “but kids bring Covid home” hysteria. We have vaccines now.
Vaccination greatly reduces the risk of severe covid and death, but it doesn't eliminate it. I know people who despite full vaccination contracted covid and are now fighting with long covid symptoms, to the point where they are unable to work for months (but chances are they would be a lot worse off if they hadn't been vaccinated). In a society such as the US with very limited social safety there is a serious risk of loss of job due to the inability to work thanks to long covid or bankruptcy thanks to the inability to pay medical bills. Kids contracting covid in school (or anywhere else) and passing it to their parents may well result in the family becoming a lot poorer or even homeless in the extreme.
Immediate covid risks aren't just limited to death either. Covid is known to cause issues with blood clotting, which can result in all kinds of things like permanent brain damage, permanent heart damage or amputations of limbs. Severe covid is also treated with severe medications and procedures, like steroids which can cause permanent (partial) blindness, ECMO which causes loss of (some) mobility in the legs far more often than not. Just regular ventilation isn't free of side effects either, in particular because of the drugs to sedate such patients. Survivors of severe covid experience PTSD and/or suicidal thoughts at very high rates.
Immediate death and other immediate primary or secondary effects aren't the only risk to covid. Long covid is a thing. Other long term effects due to covid infections are not only possible, but according to preliminary results seem likely, even after covid infections with only mild symptoms or in asymptomatic cases. This includes damage to organs, in particular the lungs, the brain, the heart and the kidneys, which may well significantly lower the life expectancy and (later life) quality of life of people affected by it, be it the kids or their parents, family or teachers.
Looking only at the immediate fatality rate in kids is dangerously shortsighted and missing most of the picture. Pointing to vaccines like they are magic isn't exactly helpful either, as they are risk reduction at best, not risk avoidance.