Well the benchmark used in Portugal was mostly available beds in ICUs, hospitalizations were also reported but deaths and ICU cases were the main ones. The rea

Well the benchmark used in Portugal was mostly available beds in ICUs, hospitalizations were also reported but deaths and ICU cases were the main ones. The reason was simple, it's literally "intensive care" that take a lot of resources from the hospitals, and it puts a strain on staff, which is specialized staff (IC nurses, docs, etc), that know procedures and how to operate the medical equipment. Like one person in intensive care needs to be handled by a lot of people, for 24 hours. The overall covid hospitalizations just indicate how bad things will become, because a lot of those will fall into ICUs, and some will die. Because you need to remember, the world misfortunes didn't stop and ICUs suddenly became exclusive for Covid19 patients... strokes, accidents, heart attacks, etc, are prevalent just like in any other year. So covid hospitalization numbers are only misleading if they choose to mislead people with them... at least here it was quite obvious the cycles of 5-10 days:case spikes > hospitalizations increase > ICU increase > deaths increase.