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> Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well. Not accurate AT ALL. NPR has a better source that also gives COVID patient percentag

> Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well. Not accurate AT ALL. NPR has a better source that also gives COVID patient percentage. Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates. For most ICUs running at 80 to 90 percent capacity is standard. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/944379919/new-data-reveal-which-hospitals-are-dangerously-full-is-yours https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799... https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthcare-leaders-talk-icu-capacity-5-sound-bites.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc...

joshuamorton 5y ago
> Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates. Marin and SC counties have 13% of beds filled by covid patients. Escambia has 21% filled by covid patients. This appears to directly contradict what you claimed.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  We're talking about ICU capacity. That's what flattening the curve is all about. Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia. Also covid patients only make up 13% of the ICU? Something is odd with your flattening the curve narrative blaming overflow on Covid patients.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Icus in normal times stay at 70% capacity, so covid adding 20-30 percent capacity fills them up. Doing what CA does, flattening the curve and keeping covid induced capacity at 10-15% allows hospitals to continue functioning normally.
    - edmcnulty101 5y ago
      Sounds like maybe whats causing the curve to need flattening is the 80% of non-Covid cases in the ICU?
      - joshuamorton 5y ago
        > Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia. So I went ahead and checked this, and it's wrong. Escambia's ICU capacity is 87% full, SC's is 90% full (and SC is a bad choice, as they have a total of 21 ICU beds in the county, they use bay area ICU beds for overflow, which are currently sitting at ~80% capacity), and Marin's is....40%. So I'm not sure what data you're looking at, but it seems to just be wrong. Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half, hospitals were reducing non-critical care. That means you have tons of people who need hip replacements or brain surgery or tumor removal who haven't been able to get it. Many of them will need to recover in the ICU a bit, so you'd want a higher baseline ICU use post-elective surgery freeze, as that implies that the "clog" is being recovered from. If the hospital is still full due to covid patients, those elective surgeries will never get done, leading people who never caught covid to suffer too. So low covid capacity, but higher overall use temporarily means that we're catching up to all the deferred non-covid care, something we really need to do! The other possibility is that you mean that the 70-80% that ICUs normally run at is somehow problematic (because well like I just said, we did actually "flatten" it by deferring elective ICU recovery for more than a year in many places). The US already has more ICU beds per capita than most nations, even other developed nations, so I'm not sure what your idea here is other than perhaps, "The us population is too unhealthy or is providing too much healthcare", which are both interesting positions to take for sure.
        edmcnulty101 5y ago
        >Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half...<a bunch of non quantitative opinion based unprovable emotional gish gallop stuff I didn't read.> Bullshit. Actual data says that Covid patients in ICU take up between 8% to 20ish% of admissions. COVID is not causing the curve to be need flattening. The medical system is. Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.

joshuamorton 5y ago

> Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates. Marin and SC counties have 13% of beds filled by covid patients. Escambia has 21% filled by covid patients. This appears to directly contradict what you claimed.

edmcnulty101 5y ago
We're talking about ICU capacity. That's what flattening the curve is all about. Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia. Also covid patients only make up 13% of the ICU? Something is odd with your flattening the curve narrative blaming overflow on Covid patients.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  Icus in normal times stay at 70% capacity, so covid adding 20-30 percent capacity fills them up. Doing what CA does, flattening the curve and keeping covid induced capacity at 10-15% allows hospitals to continue functioning normally.
  - edmcnulty101 5y ago
    Sounds like maybe whats causing the curve to need flattening is the 80% of non-Covid cases in the ICU?
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      > Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia. So I went ahead and checked this, and it's wrong. Escambia's ICU capacity is 87% full, SC's is 90% full (and SC is a bad choice, as they have a total of 21 ICU beds in the county, they use bay area ICU beds for overflow, which are currently sitting at ~80% capacity), and Marin's is....40%. So I'm not sure what data you're looking at, but it seems to just be wrong. Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half, hospitals were reducing non-critical care. That means you have tons of people who need hip replacements or brain surgery or tumor removal who haven't been able to get it. Many of them will need to recover in the ICU a bit, so you'd want a higher baseline ICU use post-elective surgery freeze, as that implies that the "clog" is being recovered from. If the hospital is still full due to covid patients, those elective surgeries will never get done, leading people who never caught covid to suffer too. So low covid capacity, but higher overall use temporarily means that we're catching up to all the deferred non-covid care, something we really need to do! The other possibility is that you mean that the 70-80% that ICUs normally run at is somehow problematic (because well like I just said, we did actually "flatten" it by deferring elective ICU recovery for more than a year in many places). The US already has more ICU beds per capita than most nations, even other developed nations, so I'm not sure what your idea here is other than perhaps, "The us population is too unhealthy or is providing too much healthcare", which are both interesting positions to take for sure.
      - edmcnulty101 5y ago
        >Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half...<a bunch of non quantitative opinion based unprovable emotional gish gallop stuff I didn't read.> Bullshit. Actual data says that Covid patients in ICU take up between 8% to 20ish% of admissions. COVID is not causing the curve to be need flattening. The medical system is. Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.