This is definitely the most pressing issue, but shouldn't we also, as a society, build the ability to e.g. double ICU capacity when needed? We're not talking about 100x here.

As much as I support vaccination, it feels like gaps in vaccination are also used as an excuse to blow off repairing an extremely fragile public health system. We've had two years at this point.

Two years doesn't seem like very long to double ICU capacity. How are you going to staff them? Nursing degrees take 3 years. Medical degrees much longer. And capacity to train doctors and nurses is also stretched by the pandemic and non-trivial to expand.

I do agree that this is something governments ought to be looking into over the long term though.

If the short-term problem is specific to Covid, you just need to bring/train people for that.

Training people to assist Covid cases, run PCR tests, should be a matter of weeks, not years. Germany did it, I have 4 (four!) test centers on within a block of distance, all of them are filled with students and otherwise-unemployed people who got some minimal training.

I don't think test centres are the problem. I live and the UK and the only time tests were scarce was a few days around Christmas when there was very high demand.

A standard nursing degree in Europe takes three years. That's not a scientific law, it's not like it takes 365 * 3 * 2/3 = 17520 hours to learn how to be useful in an ICU. An LPN can be done in a year. We trained mechanical engineers in as little time during WWII.

If we're to treat this like an emergency, why aren't we treating it like an emergency?

> If we're to treat this like an emergency, why aren't we treating it like an emergency?

Because in truth it probably never was. We assembled fully staffed field hospitals that went completely unused.