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Imagine being given almost 2 years to build capacity to put that fire out so the community could go back to normal life but instead zero additional capacity was

Imagine being given almost 2 years to build capacity to put that fire out so the community could go back to normal life but instead zero additional capacity was built? Hospitals had almost 2 years to build capacity. Where is it? Why is society being asked to continue bailing out institutions that have had an enormous amount of time to prepare?

bonzini 5y ago
You just don't build capacity against something that grows exponentially until it hits a substantial part of the overall population. Say a country like the UK, at the peak of the curve, would have 1% of their population getting sick everyday for a week or two, and 1% of that getting in a hospital (very conservative since 1% is the IFR and lots of people get out of the hospital on their legs) You might have built the 90.000 beds you need, but where will you find the doctors?
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Such an excuse. You find the doctors or find a way to get people to help. It’s an emergency. Figure it out. Forcing society to grind to an halt because some “experts” just waive their hand and give up is absurd.
  - mahkeiro 5y ago
    How are you going to find the doctors? It doesn’t take 2 years to train one. Of course you can get them from other countries but here you are just transferring the problem to someone else.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  sorry, have I been time travelled back to march 2020? I heard this exact same preposterous extrapolation then. people going mad with fear at the omnipotent power of the exponential function. hundreds of thousands in hospitals all at once, millions of people sick at a time, we were told. I should know, I was one of them. I scribbled some numbers on the back of a fag packet, concluded we were doomed, and started buying tinned food and scrounging N95s from B&Q. but then it didn't happen, did it? it never fucking happened, anywhere, lockdown or no. I remember a giant emergency field hospital that got built in the middle of london, and it sat there completely fucking bone idle. my initial numbers were wrong, and so were the experts'. I remember a terrifyingly huge bell curve for hospitalizations assuming no lockdown, with a piddling little horizontal line just above the x-axis representing bed capacity. that apocalypse never happened for sweden or the numerous other places which never locked down. I remember watching the sweden case graph intently around May, smugly predicting a self-inflicted genocide. It never came. Then there was a US state (I forget which one) that ended its lockdown and opened up back to normal. I very confidently predicted a disaster that never arrived. eventually (much later than I should have) I woke up from the mass hallucination. turns out covid, like other coronaviruses, is strongly seasonal, it waxes and wanes for reasons we don't quite understand. the exponential curve always burns itself out well short of what the hammer-and-dance people said, no matter what we do. do you expect us to forget all that? do you really think we can be fooled twice? do you honestly think people will sit down and take another wave of lockdowns when we're in the middle of a supply chain and inflation crisis caused by the first one?
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Thank you very much for this. You summarize my thoughts exactly. SARS-COV-2 is a real physical virus that can ruin your day. But Covid isn’t the only illness it has seemed to cause. It’s also caused one of the greatest mass hysteria events in human existence. This meme/virus we’ve been passing around for 630 days and counting is as much a illness of the mind as it is something that makes you physically I’ll.
dekhn 5y ago
Hospitals are Covid hotspots. Lots of transmission. We need isolation center capacity

bonzini 5y ago

You just don't build capacity against something that grows exponentially until it hits a substantial part of the overall population. Say a country like the UK, at the peak of the curve, would have 1% of their population getting sick everyday for a week or two, and 1% of that getting in a hospital (very conservative since 1% is the IFR and lots of people get out of the hospital on their legs) You might have built the 90.000 beds you need, but where will you find the doctors?

spookthesunset 5y ago
Such an excuse. You find the doctors or find a way to get people to help. It’s an emergency. Figure it out. Forcing society to grind to an halt because some “experts” just waive their hand and give up is absurd.
- mahkeiro 5y ago
  How are you going to find the doctors? It doesn’t take 2 years to train one. Of course you can get them from other countries but here you are just transferring the problem to someone else.
_dain_ 5y ago
sorry, have I been time travelled back to march 2020? I heard this exact same preposterous extrapolation then. people going mad with fear at the omnipotent power of the exponential function. hundreds of thousands in hospitals all at once, millions of people sick at a time, we were told. I should know, I was one of them. I scribbled some numbers on the back of a fag packet, concluded we were doomed, and started buying tinned food and scrounging N95s from B&Q. but then it didn't happen, did it? it never fucking happened, anywhere, lockdown or no. I remember a giant emergency field hospital that got built in the middle of london, and it sat there completely fucking bone idle. my initial numbers were wrong, and so were the experts'. I remember a terrifyingly huge bell curve for hospitalizations assuming no lockdown, with a piddling little horizontal line just above the x-axis representing bed capacity. that apocalypse never happened for sweden or the numerous other places which never locked down. I remember watching the sweden case graph intently around May, smugly predicting a self-inflicted genocide. It never came. Then there was a US state (I forget which one) that ended its lockdown and opened up back to normal. I very confidently predicted a disaster that never arrived. eventually (much later than I should have) I woke up from the mass hallucination. turns out covid, like other coronaviruses, is strongly seasonal, it waxes and wanes for reasons we don't quite understand. the exponential curve always burns itself out well short of what the hammer-and-dance people said, no matter what we do. do you expect us to forget all that? do you really think we can be fooled twice? do you honestly think people will sit down and take another wave of lockdowns when we're in the middle of a supply chain and inflation crisis caused by the first one?
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Thank you very much for this. You summarize my thoughts exactly. SARS-COV-2 is a real physical virus that can ruin your day. But Covid isn’t the only illness it has seemed to cause. It’s also caused one of the greatest mass hysteria events in human existence. This meme/virus we’ve been passing around for 630 days and counting is as much a illness of the mind as it is something that makes you physically I’ll.

dekhn 5y ago

Hospitals are Covid hotspots. Lots of transmission. We need isolation center capacity