4 ms·

Now that a majority of adults are vaccinated - and hopefully almost all of the most vulnerable - are we still at risk of health services being overwhelmed? May

• logifail 5y ago
  > The numbers per capita are bound to be worse in Germany and parts the USA, which have lower overall vaccination rates Germany and the USA have way more critical care beds available per capita than almost anywhere else in the developed world, by some margin, at least based on the figures in this article (the US more than 5x as many as the UK, Germany almost 4.5x) To a dreadful first-order approximation, shouldn't it be around 5x harder to overwhelm a system which has 5x more capacity? https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-countries-with-the-most-critical-care-beds-per-capita-infographic/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-co...
  • loup-vaillant 5y ago
    > To a dreadful first-order approximation, shouldn't it be around 5x harder to overwhelm a system which has 5x more capacity? Not with an exponentially spreading disease. Remember the lake that double its size each day, and becomes full in 50 days: it takes 49 days to make it half-full, and if you doubled its capacity, it'd fill in 51 days instead. In the end, it mainly depends on the (serious) morbidity rate and the transmission rate. The latter more than the former, generally: if it is any higher than one, you'll have a doubling period just like the lake (longer than a day, though) until you approach saturation (a sizeable portion of the population is infected or immune). Doubling hospital capacity will only give you a doubling period's worth of time before you have to resort to other measures that push the transmission rate below 1. Now if the (serious) morbidity rate is so low that hospitals don't become saturated even as most of the population got infected, that's another story.
    • logifail 5y ago
      > Not with an exponentially spreading disease [..] remember the lake [...] Mathemetically that's OK but cases can't just keep on doubling, we'll run out of uninfected people and/or ones vulnerable enough to get a Covid19 infection that puts them in hospital. As a thought experiment, if tomorrow we were to magically vaccinate in one fell swoop all the under 18 year olds in Germany (or the UK, or the USA), just how many intensive/critical care hospital beds would that prevent from being filled up by those very same under 18 year olds over the coming winter? Note that at the start of this month (September) the BMJ reported that "80% of young adults in UK are likely to [already] have antibodies"[0] [0] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2162 https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2162
      • loup-vaillant 5y ago
        > cases can't just keep on doubling Indeed they cannot. That's why I wrote "until you approach saturation".
• native_samples 5y ago
  The SPI-M models have a consistent history of being wildly wrong everywhere they've been applied. It's really not worth paying any attention to them.