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Given a virus that requires hospitalization at a certain rate, there is a certain point where the hospitals end up overrun for all other activities. In an effo
by t-writescode 6y ago
Given a virus that requires hospitalization at a certain rate, there is a certain point where the hospitals end up overrun for all other activities.
In an effort to stave off that danger, local governments enacted lockdowns with the intent of reducing the spread of the virus.
The virus, in the United States, has an established death rate of around 1.5% and a hospitalization rate higher than that.
It also experiences exponential growth.
Our hospitals didn't have the capacity to handle all the _potential_ load; and, once they're approaching that capacity, it's already too late and they'll blow past it. That's the danger of exponential growth.
Let's imagine doublings:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128.
If total capacity is 100, the moment that capacity is less than 20% used up, we're 2-3 timesteps away from using over 100%. It is a very dangerous gamble, and controversial decisions are made or not made and the worst part is that, when you do the safe thing, you have no way of being certain or explaining that the bad thing would have or could have happened, because "it's only 20%" and that looks small.
- neuland 6y agoFlorida, Texas, and Sweden seem to be doing fine. Edit: also, the military, FEMA, and non-profits built temporary hospitals in spring, but they weren't needed.
- umvi 6y agoWe had months and months to build temporary hospitals... Why didn't we?
- matthewmacleod 6y agoWho were you planning to staff all of your temporary hospitals with?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- umvi 6y agoSo you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources?
- matthewmacleod 6y agoI don't recall saying that, no. I'd wager that nobody would seriously say that, since it's obviously false.
- umvi 6y agoI interpreted the question as you implying temporary hospitals are absurd because there wouldn't be staff to man them.
- t-writescode 6y agoAt some point, you're experiencing runway problems. 9 women can't produce a baby in a month, after all. They can, however, collectively produce 9 babies, 9 months after the start date.
- umvi 6y agoIn an emergency situation, you make do. Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional. You can hire a bunch of boy scouts to do the repetitive stuff, and have them call in a real doctor or nurse if symptom progression isn't matching their training.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional. Normal hospitals are already staffed at pretty close to the maximum rate of less qualified to more expert staff for their caseload, and the easy caseload that requires less expert share of time is pushed out of hospitals entirely by the crisis. Surging additional minimally trained staff doesn't help anything.
- dragonwriter 6y agoWe, in many places, did. Federally, there was no strategy because federal powers were devoted to promoting the pandemic (e.g., via the Defense Production Act invocation to shield the meat packing industry from state safety efforts) rather than fighting it. OTOH, hospitals also require skilled staff, which takes longer to build.
- nradov 6y agoThe established death rate in the US is nowhere near 1.5%. Best current population IFR estimate is somewhere in the 0.6% range. That's bad enough, no need to exaggerate. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.11.20209627v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.11.20209627v...
- t-writescode 6y agoI wasn’t. https://covidusa.net/ https://covidusa.net/
- nradov 6y agoNo, you were. Please stop spreading misinformation about a serious subject. You appear to have confused case fatality rate with the population infection fatality rate. CFR is largely meaningless because so many infections are never counted. Look at the results from antibody seroprevalence studies.