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When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. You just have to think outside of the box. If this truly was an emergency, we'd

When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. You just have to think outside of the box. If this truly was an emergency, we'd have found a way to staff covid ICU's. Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way. We managed to build giant ships in like 3 or 6 months in WWII. I'm pretty sure we could figure out how to staff 400 or so ICU's with people capable of managing sick covid patients. It might be all these people know how to do... but we could do it. We have almost unlimited resources to do so.

eropple 5y ago
"I readily admit that I don't know what I'm talking about but at the same time I'm going to insist that my hypothetical situation is definitely correct and the knowledgeable people working on medical staffing and capacity management for their entire careers simply do not know as much as me, a computer toucher." Somehow I remain unconvinced that "thinking outside the box" conjures doctors and nurses into existence or makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job. I guess you could demand the military have doctors and nurses work at the point of a gun, all so John Q. Public probably still couldn't go to Target without a mask on two years hence. That sounds great.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all this, then we should have poured the entire nation's worth of resources into building healthcare capacity. Period. It is absolutely inexcusable to continue playing the "healthcare might collapse" card 2 years into this. If people used this many excuses back in WWII we'd have lost the damn war. "Oh, it takes 4 years to design a build a ship... sorry. we can't just pull ships out of our butt. Guess we will just have to let them win". Bullshit. We made it happen. We could make it happen for this too. This is supposed to be an emergency, remember? Every second you have people in lockdown is a second of each of those peoples very short lives you've now wasted. Figure it out!
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    Exactly. It's crazy how some people think that shutting down pretty much everything within days is a more viable alternative or even more doable than ramping up healthcare capacity in... 2 years. They'll usually wave away the massive repercussions that shutdowns cause but they will become very perfectionist when it comes to standard of care and how we need fully trained doctors and nothing less. It's an emergency, as you said it's not time for perfection because the costs are extreme
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      I think what amazes me is how little it seems some people value their own time and life. Like, life is super short. I sacrificed a non-trival amount of it so these "experts" could build up healthcare capacity. They have a moral obligation to not waste my life... which they completely did. Why there aren't riots on the street over the fact that the public is still being blamed for not "taking this seriously" is beyond me. Get fucked, dudes--y'all had 2 years to figure this out.
      - riekus 5y ago
        Amen, but where I live you are discribed as mentally ill for thinking this way.
    - riekus 5y ago
      Totally agree. I have been talking about this for the past year. The cost of lockdowns in the Netherlands is ridiculous. Everyone says we can't scale IC blabla. In a crisis we can even put mechanics at beds if we need to. For me personally it shows it isn't that serious as the fear mongering would like us to be believe
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    > Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either. ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentration has to be reducing the demand on it in the first place (via vaccination, pre-hospital treatment, public safety measures, and, as a last resort, lockdowns).
davidw 5y ago
Vaccines were readily available; perhaps no one predicted quite so many people would avoid them, preferring to take a chance suffocating to death. Administering vaccines is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than expanding hospitals.
throwhauser 5y ago
> When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. > Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way. What makes you so sure?
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  I mean again I'm no expert but it seems to me that if all these people are supposed to do is treat exactly one illness, it would be possible to train a certain set of people on how to manage 80% of the workload and escalate the exceptions to somebody with more knowledge. It isn't like this staff has to treat anything else. Just an idea. Like I said, I'm no expert but the fact that absolutely nobody has attempted to figure it out is bullshit. They haven't even tried. They just keep throwing out excuse after excuse and blaming the public for their failures. They literally have almost unlimited resources. They could get shit figured out somehow.
  - BirdieNZ 5y ago
    > They haven't even tried This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was considered (and tried even!) and rejected as unworkable. In other words, you are certainly not the first person to think "what if we just had more hospital beds and staff and throw heaps of money at it to make it happen". The reason no country (that I know of) has done this is because it is impractical. The alternative is a grand conspiracy involving collusion in hundreds of countries and states and their leaders, including all the departments of health and the various officials, in democratic countries, communist countries, authoritarian countries and so on, some of whom are literally at war with each other.
    - davidw 5y ago
      When COVID first hit Italy, they started calling up retired doctors and also sending people in medical school into clinical support positions. And it just wasn't enough.
edanm 5y ago
> When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. You just have to think outside of the box. If this truly was an emergency, we'd have found a way to staff covid ICU's. Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way. If there's one thing we should've learned from Corona, it's that this line of thinking is wrong. Even facing an emergency like a global pandemic, that has cost the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars of economic damage, most governments did a lot of things very obviously wrong. Clearly, emergencies don't suddenly cause politics to stop and politicians to act perfectly.

eropple 5y ago

"I readily admit that I don't know what I'm talking about but at the same time I'm going to insist that my hypothetical situation is definitely correct and the knowledgeable people working on medical staffing and capacity management for their entire careers simply do not know as much as me, a computer toucher." Somehow I remain unconvinced that "thinking outside the box" conjures doctors and nurses into existence or makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job. I guess you could demand the military have doctors and nurses work at the point of a gun, all so John Q. Public probably still couldn't go to Target without a mask on two years hence. That sounds great.

spookthesunset 5y ago
> makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all this, then we should have poured the entire nation's worth of resources into building healthcare capacity. Period. It is absolutely inexcusable to continue playing the "healthcare might collapse" card 2 years into this. If people used this many excuses back in WWII we'd have lost the damn war. "Oh, it takes 4 years to design a build a ship... sorry. we can't just pull ships out of our butt. Guess we will just have to let them win". Bullshit. We made it happen. We could make it happen for this too. This is supposed to be an emergency, remember? Every second you have people in lockdown is a second of each of those peoples very short lives you've now wasted. Figure it out!
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Exactly. It's crazy how some people think that shutting down pretty much everything within days is a more viable alternative or even more doable than ramping up healthcare capacity in... 2 years. They'll usually wave away the massive repercussions that shutdowns cause but they will become very perfectionist when it comes to standard of care and how we need fully trained doctors and nothing less. It's an emergency, as you said it's not time for perfection because the costs are extreme
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    I think what amazes me is how little it seems some people value their own time and life. Like, life is super short. I sacrificed a non-trival amount of it so these "experts" could build up healthcare capacity. They have a moral obligation to not waste my life... which they completely did. Why there aren't riots on the street over the fact that the public is still being blamed for not "taking this seriously" is beyond me. Get fucked, dudes--y'all had 2 years to figure this out.
    - riekus 5y ago
      Amen, but where I live you are discribed as mentally ill for thinking this way.
  - riekus 5y ago
    Totally agree. I have been talking about this for the past year. The cost of lockdowns in the Netherlands is ridiculous. Everyone says we can't scale IC blabla. In a crisis we can even put mechanics at beds if we need to. For me personally it shows it isn't that serious as the fear mongering would like us to be believe
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either. ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentration has to be reducing the demand on it in the first place (via vaccination, pre-hospital treatment, public safety measures, and, as a last resort, lockdowns).

davidw 5y ago

Vaccines were readily available; perhaps no one predicted quite so many people would avoid them, preferring to take a chance suffocating to death. Administering vaccines is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than expanding hospitals.

throwhauser 5y ago

> When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. > Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way. What makes you so sure?

spookthesunset 5y ago
I mean again I'm no expert but it seems to me that if all these people are supposed to do is treat exactly one illness, it would be possible to train a certain set of people on how to manage 80% of the workload and escalate the exceptions to somebody with more knowledge. It isn't like this staff has to treat anything else. Just an idea. Like I said, I'm no expert but the fact that absolutely nobody has attempted to figure it out is bullshit. They haven't even tried. They just keep throwing out excuse after excuse and blaming the public for their failures. They literally have almost unlimited resources. They could get shit figured out somehow.
- BirdieNZ 5y ago
  > They haven't even tried This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was considered (and tried even!) and rejected as unworkable. In other words, you are certainly not the first person to think "what if we just had more hospital beds and staff and throw heaps of money at it to make it happen". The reason no country (that I know of) has done this is because it is impractical. The alternative is a grand conspiracy involving collusion in hundreds of countries and states and their leaders, including all the departments of health and the various officials, in democratic countries, communist countries, authoritarian countries and so on, some of whom are literally at war with each other.
  - davidw 5y ago
    When COVID first hit Italy, they started calling up retired doctors and also sending people in medical school into clinical support positions. And it just wasn't enough.

edanm 5y ago

> When you have virtually unlimited resources you can do almost anything you want. You just have to think outside of the box. If this truly was an emergency, we'd have found a way to staff covid ICU's. Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way. If there's one thing we should've learned from Corona, it's that this line of thinking is wrong. Even facing an emergency like a global pandemic, that has cost the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars of economic damage, most governments did a lot of things very obviously wrong. Clearly, emergencies don't suddenly cause politics to stop and politicians to act perfectly.