One thing I don't think people really understand about #COVID19 and hospitals is that the health system ROUTINELY operates at 85%+ capacity
There really isn't much wiggle room around
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Think about it - you don't staff a ward with triple the people you need, you'd go bankrupt overnight Instead, you plan to operate with every day ~nearly~ full, and a bit of extra room just in case
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What does that look like in practice? Say you have a fairly big ICU - 30 beds In practice, you'd probably plan to have 24-27 of those full EVERY DAY
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And now coronavirus comes around and you need all 30 beds to treat people with respiratory issues What happens to all your regular patients? Where do they go? You see the problem
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The issue with massive epidemics, as you can see in Italy, is that this little bit of extra room really isn't that much
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Here's an example As per the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare, there were 20,257,957 patient bed-days used in 2018 in Australia In the same year, there were 22,511,375 AVAILABLE bed-days That's 89.99% capacitypic.twitter.com/LePJMIRcfe
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Source for that info is here:https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/hospitals/hospital-resources-2017-18-ahs/contents/hospitals-and-average-available-beds …
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(A bed-day is basically 24 hours of a person being in a hospital bed)
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