The healthcare system also had more than a year and a half to build capacity to deal with this stuff? Why should society be required to bail out hospitals by adhering to arbitrary restrictions on their life?
I completely disagree with them. They seem to think hospitals operate like spinning up extra VMs when extra load is generated.
And, in particular areas where there is an outbreak it can work like that. Much like you can spin up another VM when you still have underlying resources to do, you can setup an emergency hospital when you can borrow resources from elsewhere.
When everywhere is busy, let's say a major pandemic outbreak, there is no extra capacity, and you tend to lose capacity by attrition of a worn out workforce.
I think it's fair to say that in the past year and a half, we had time to build capacity slowly and intelligently. OTOH, that's not any individual hospital's job. In our capitalistic society, if OP wanted to go build their own hospital, nobody was stopping them.
Change the config file for the hospital from 100 doctors to 200 doctors, and reload the config. You can spin up a new doctor in what 30 seconds? Totally how the world works from the armchair.
Not like it takes 6-7 years to get the basics down, weed out the ones who really are not as into it as they thought or just wont make it, or cant keep up. Not to mention the ones that want to go off and do tit jobs for a living rather than feeding experimental medcine to people who are about to die because they excercised their rights to refuse to take tested medcines.
They totally did though. Did you see all of the new stadiums and ships and warehouses and tents that were erected at the start of the pandemic ready to take the overflow?
None were utilized.
Can you point me to some ICU data that shows them filling up in the past year and a half?
NOT fear mongering media articles, but the actual data you're using?
I mean my local hospitals have been publishing icu bed usage since near the beginning of the pandemic and during every surge they run low on icu beds with the majority of the beds used by covid patients.
An odd analogy, given that hospital workers don't feed anyone - it's the rest of society that feeds them.
By point-blank refusing to even consider increasing capacity, despite being written blank cheques by military engineers and ventilator designers, and insisting instead on lockdowns, it is rather the other way around: society fed the healthcare managers who then turned around and bit that hand. Supermarket staff, truckers, farm workers, meat factory operators and so on cannot lock down or work from home, so they had to keep working throughout. Yet health managers just looked blankly at their shiny new emergency hospitals and acted baffled that they were expected to do things differently to normal. Nobody increased capacity to help ensure care for the essential workers. Eventually the quasi-religious approach to the health system will go away and people will start to wonder why exactly all those newly built beds had to be dismantled instead of being paired with an emergency training programme.
I mean all this “protect the hospital” crap is bailing them out. Might as well be honest about it. People should be pissed that hospitals didn’t build capacity… why they aren’t, beats me.
