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All of that plus "What kills people from COVID now?" To which the answer is "Lack of access to ICU-capable health facilities." And what causes lack of access?
by ethbr0 5y ago
All of that plus "What kills people from COVID now?" To which the answer is "Lack of access to ICU-capable health facilities."
And what causes lack of access? Total number of people hospitalized. And how does that number grow? Exponentially.
So every public health department in the world is optimizing for "How do we prevent our limited number of ICU-capable health facilities from being overwhelmed."
And that comes down to predicting the future hospitalization rate, which can be predicted by the current case count as you said.
- toyg 5y agoI agree completely, with the addition that this has been the case pretty much from the start. Evolution of therapies has been minimal, the killer factor has always been the level of pressure on health services - which doesn't just mean ventilators as initially thought, but the entire care process over several days. And this is why vaccines are a game changer: they remove the need for hospitalization.
- ethbr0 5y agoAlso, obligatory: staff. Which is to say the health care system is sized for employing enough highly-trained trauma / ICU staff to support normal operations, with some small (very small) amount of surge capacity. And people under-estimate the specialization & experience required for high-level ICU and respiratory care. You can't just take a floor nurse and transfer them over to do the new work. And the amount of complex hospitalizations due to COVID can very quickly become a couple orders of magnitude above "normal operations."
- landemva 5y ago' "What kills people from COVID now?" To which the answer is ' Matching with observed reality a better answer may be: 18 months of enhancing the comorbidities of being overweight and in poor physical condition. Sitting on couch while snacking on carbohydrates and fear has been detrimental to many people.