LogFAQs > #961218201

BEERandWEED posted...

The common flu and cold don't overrun hospitals.

That would be because, by and large, influenza and the common cold are less contagious and significantly less dangerous than Covid. Covid has killed more Americans every month since September 1 than influenza does in a typical year, and that's despite significant efforts to prevent that.

I don't know why you people keep insisting on trying to pretend that Covid is no worse than the flu, but that is outright false.

BEERandWEED posted...

The covid panic from fearmongering is what is causing hospitals to be overwhelmed.

Covid patients don't get admitted to the ICU because of fearmongering. They get admitted to the ICU because they're hours away from multiple organ failure. Similarly, people that show up with cold symptoms don't automatically get admitted for Covid unless they actually have a serious enough case to warrant it.

In places that are handling Covid remotely sensibly, people don't rush to the ER because they have cold symptoms. People get tested (at test sites that are generally not actually in hospitals) if they have cold symptoms, while isolating until they get their results back. Those that test positive are then instructed to isolate and seek further medical attention if their symptoms worsen in specifically defined ways. If people are going to straight to the ER, it's because testing protocols haven't been made clear and/or tests are not adequately available.

I'm not sure why you think an extra 60,000+ people being admitted to hospitals each day is just a consequence of fearmongering and not a product of 60,000+ people per day actually being sick enough to need hospitalization, nor that an extra 60,000+ inpatients per day wouldn't be pretty taxing for most hospitals (average length of stay is 11.9 days, so that works out to a total ~714,000 hospital beds allocated nation-wide to dealing with Covid patients for as long as rates stay this high). Even that doesn't capture the whole story, since outbreaks are generally quite localized and certain hospitals are having to deal with a disproportionate share of that total.

Zeus posted...

No, because your explanation is gibberish and I'm pretty sure it's wrong on top of it.

It's the whole "flatten the curve" thing that bounced around so much in the early days. By imposing lockdown measures to reduce case rates, you cause it to take longer for the whole population to gain immunity by being infected, but you prevent the total case load from getting higher than the health care system can handle. In practice, natural immunity doesn't seem to be lasting long enough for "the whole population will eventually reach herd immunity on their own" to be a valid philosophy, but it's still beneficial to keep case numbers low enough to avoid overwhelming hospitals while we wait for vaccination rates to get high enough to improve the situation (at least, it would have been, if people didn't suck).

Duckbear's explanation isn't exactly helpful, but he's quite correct.