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Most hospitals don't have all that much slack in bed capacity; especially at the tail end of flu season most of those beds are already filled. The hospitals ma

Most hospitals don't have all that much slack in bed capacity; especially at the tail end of flu season most of those beds are already filled. The hospitals may be extrapolating the growth rate of the disease and realizing how soon they will have problems. Or given the nature of the outbreak it could be that even within Lombardy there are areas with much higher concentrations of cases, like there are more cases, inc. per capita, in Wuhan than other cities in Hubei. What's not plausible is ICU beds being taken up by people who don't have the disease (maybe miild-to-moderate flus or bad colds) and are just panicking. Emergency room lines, sure. Test shortages, absolutely. But hospitals will not put someone who's just scared and doesn't even need to be admitted at all into the ICU.

oarsinsync 7y ago
> Most hospitals don't have all that much slack in bed capacity; especially at the tail end of flu season Remember that there's a difference between hospital beds and ICU beds. In the UK, we maintain 80% utilisation of our ICU beds all year round[0], with very little change in the number of beds available in real number terms. We have ~4100 total ICU beds, which can be expanded to ~5000 if all operating theatres, etc are shut down and used as ICU equivalent instead. While getting past flu season will help the total number of beds, it does nothing for the ICU. This is the other reason why it's increasingly important to https://www.FlattenThesCurve.com https://www.FlattenThesCurve.com and employ social distancing techniques. The rate of patients being admitted into ICUs needs to be slowed as much as possible. Once we're out of capacity, every additional patient has a much higher probability of dying than the overall fatality statistics indicate. [0] https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/03/MSitRep-SPN-v2.1-Ja7T2.pdf https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sit...
- Heliosmaster 7y ago
  There's a typo, it's https://www.flattenthecurve.com/ https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
- makomk 7y ago
  The NHS regularly has to cancel routine operations in order to free up space for flu patients during the flu season, which might be one reason why the bed usage seems so uniform. Obviously if they're already doing that for flu it leaves less slack in the system if something else comes along.

oarsinsync 7y ago

> Most hospitals don't have all that much slack in bed capacity; especially at the tail end of flu season Remember that there's a difference between hospital beds and ICU beds. In the UK, we maintain 80% utilisation of our ICU beds all year round[0], with very little change in the number of beds available in real number terms. We have ~4100 total ICU beds, which can be expanded to ~5000 if all operating theatres, etc are shut down and used as ICU equivalent instead. While getting past flu season will help the total number of beds, it does nothing for the ICU. This is the other reason why it's increasingly important to https://www.FlattenThesCurve.com https://www.FlattenThesCurve.com and employ social distancing techniques. The rate of patients being admitted into ICUs needs to be slowed as much as possible. Once we're out of capacity, every additional patient has a much higher probability of dying than the overall fatality statistics indicate. [0] https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/03/MSitRep-SPN-v2.1-Ja7T2.pdf https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sit...

Heliosmaster 7y ago
There's a typo, it's https://www.flattenthecurve.com/ https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
makomk 7y ago
The NHS regularly has to cancel routine operations in order to free up space for flu patients during the flu season, which might be one reason why the bed usage seems so uniform. Obviously if they're already doing that for flu it leaves less slack in the system if something else comes along.