4 ms·
People are mentioning this is due to lack of testing, but if that were the case wouldn’t hospitals be overwhelmed like they have been in Italy and elsewhere? T
by sendos 7y ago
People are mentioning this is due to lack of testing, but if that were the case wouldn’t hospitals be overwhelmed like they have been in Italy and elsewhere?
Testing or no testing if hospitals run out of ventilators for people in need, or out of masks, that would still happen if the disease was spreading like it does elsewhere
- tptacek 7y agoThe counterclaim is that Japan has an unusually high per capita number of ICU beds.
- MikeAmelung 7y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-countries-with-the-most-critical-care-beds-per-capita-infographic/#3e76f8447f86 https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-co... So is this nonsense?
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoThis appears to be true, it is #1 in hospital beds (not the same as ICU beds, but should be correlated) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_beds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_...
- nicoburns 7y agoNote: that article also lists number of ICU beds per 100000 population, and it seems that it's not that highly correlated. Turkey has the most ICU beds.
- chmod775 7y ago> but should be correlated It's not, as shown by the very link you posted. ICU beds are a separate column in that table. Japan only has ~7.3/100k.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoThat seems to be correct. Oh well, I hope that the link helped.
- dguaraglia 7y agoI have no real data to back this up, but it could also be that there's a lower number of comorbidity across the average population. Or it could be that Japanese have perfected 'social distancing'.
- Medicalidiot 7y agoAge is the best correlating factor right now. They are prime for an outbreak demographic wise. >http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9a9b-fea8db1a8f51 http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...
- yurlungur 7y agoI think due to the nature of (generally) exponential growth, no country can be expected to be able to "cover" a true outbreak. However, it's also true that the spike in cases will only happen in a very short period of time so it's not very informative to look at hospital beds if the peak is not there yet. That said, I would expect Japan to be further on the growth curve compared to other Western countries, so not sure what's going on especially given the limited information.
- neonate 7y agoThe article discusses that.