eugyppius

Since fall I have been saying that something is wrong with reported ICU capacity & occupancy in DE A big part of that something, others have discovered, is that hospitals under-report capacity, in order to qualify for government subsidies. More confirmation has now emerged:https://twitter.com/m_grill/status/1402864606788390921 …

On the one hand, Merkel's government uses high ICU occupancy to justify lockdowns. On the other hand, they literally subsidise hospitals that report ICU occupancy in excess of 75%.

Strange incentive structure

Earlier, hospitals received enormous supplements for empty beds, I believe 50k Euros for each new ICU bed they set up. Capacity ballooned. Then in Fall 2020 they stopped that and started subsidising hospitals with mostly full ICUs instead.

It's like the "dying with covid" phenomenon where hospitals were/are paid per covid case (I think that's how it went). Suddenly everybody who died has covid.

You see the absurd situation containment put the government in: The reason for lockdowns, is that Corona overwhelms ICUs. At first they expand ICU capacity, but this destroys their entire containment rationale. So instead they had to incentivise full ICUs ...