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.