A woman filmed the inside of one of those British hospitals which are supposedly out of space because of COVID-19. Then she posted it. Police arrested her. (Hint: hospital was largely empty of patients.)
I know the problem is real but it is easy to see went there are skeptics out there.
Here is a project: find data on ICU bed use during the last few winters. I know that regional ICU crises in winter because of flu are common. It would be nice to have some unimpeachable data on that.
If you look at Arizona hospital data, you will see that we are maintaining a little bit of ICU headroom. But, look closely and you will see that this is the result of denying non-emergency care. In other words, the ICU headroom remains relatively constant, while ICU COVID19 usage goes way up and routine ICU usage goes way down.
ReplyDeleteThat is a dangerous situation for two reasons. The most obvious is the denial of care that people should be getting. The other is that with a virus of this level of explosive growth capability, somehow maintaining a small percentage of available ICU capacity is difficult to do.
Also, our largest hospital chain (Banner) has said that it will no longer offer any non-routine care, due to the COVID19 load>
For Arizona stats, our health department has a number of graphs available from the page at the link. I recommend the "Hospital Bed Usage and Availability" icon (then scroll down). You can hover over the graph.
For today, for ICU usage:
61% COVID19
32% non-COVID19
7% available
A few months back:
7% COVID19
72% Non-COVID19
21% Available