> I don't understand this part. Isn't the important number here the total number of people in the hospital (or ICU or other ward) relative to the total number t

> I don't understand this part. Isn't the important number here the total number of people in the hospital (or ICU or other ward) relative to the total number that the hospital (or ICU or other ward) can accommodate? Or alternatively, the total excess relative to normal years. I agree with this point and the article doesn't seem to mention this, surely the important statistic is number of in-patients per week comparing week by week with 2019. If it's much higher then there is a big problem regardless of whether these patients have covid or not as we haven't built any significant hospital capacity or trained a lot more medical staff since then.