Italy has been seeing overflowing hospitals in recent previous years as well during peak influenza season. So that doesn't by itself imply something truly unusu

Italy has been seeing overflowing hospitals in recent previous years as well during peak influenza season. So that doesn't by itself imply something truly unusual. I wish I could find the source for this (it was a medical paper) but I've read a lot of web pages lately and not bookmarked them all systematically. Yesterday I pointed out that dramatic news of war-like conditions in hospitals, running out of beds, erecting tents to hold extra patients and warnings of imminent collapse have happened in the recent past in ... California: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632440 If you look you can instantly find news stories that sound exactly like those coming out of Italy at the moment, but from recent years in flu season, for almost any country. It's fair to say that hospitals running out of beds or putting people in corridors, tents, hastily converted rooms isn't unusual. Perhaps we should ask why there isn't enough peak capacity in western health systems to handle just a bad flu season, let alone something like this.