No country in the world has the capacity to take care of more than “a couple thousand” ICU patients (well, it’s more like a couple of ten thousand ICU patients for the best equipped and richest large countries in the world, like Germany). Simply because “a couple thousand” is all that’s needed during ordinary times.
Yeah, there are issues with staffing and inadequate payment of the staff, sure, and those problems are long-standing and unresolved, but even if they were solved that wouldn’t be much of a help.
We would then maybe talk about a couple thousand (here in the literal sense) beds in terms of increasing ICU capacity, if that (simply because it’s not as though Germany’s existing ICU capacity is somehow ridiculously small, it’s quite large, actually if you put it in context and adding a couple thousand beds would be a massive increase). That would be helpful but wouldn’t really solve the underlying problem.
And either way: Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It’s completely misguided. Not least of which because it takes forever to increase capacity. You have to train people for that …
Unvaccinated people are to blame for this, but especially cowardly politicians who were too frightened to start implementing vaccination mandates right away (summer 2021), as soon as it was clear that you cannot reach good enough vaccination numbers just based on pleas alone.
We do have a solution for this and the solution is vaccination. However, in the very short term even that won’t be good enough, we need to break the 4th wave and for that contact reduction is necessary (and already happening).
Think about time frames.
Contact reduction, will show its effects within a couple weeks, vaccination mandates plus a logistical push for booster vaccinations, will show their effects within one month to three months, making healthcare more resilient in general, will show its effects within a couple of years, maybe a decade.
Yeah, there are issues with staffing and inadequate payment of the staff, sure, and those problems are long-standing and unresolved, but even if they were solved that wouldn’t be much of a help.
We would then maybe talk about a couple thousand (here in the literal sense) beds in terms of increasing ICU capacity, if that (simply because it’s not as though Germany’s existing ICU capacity is somehow ridiculously small, it’s quite large, actually if you put it in context and adding a couple thousand beds would be a massive increase). That would be helpful but wouldn’t really solve the underlying problem.
And either way: Increasing ICU capacity right now is not a solution. It’s completely misguided. Not least of which because it takes forever to increase capacity. You have to train people for that …
Unvaccinated people are to blame for this, but especially cowardly politicians who were too frightened to start implementing vaccination mandates right away (summer 2021), as soon as it was clear that you cannot reach good enough vaccination numbers just based on pleas alone.
We do have a solution for this and the solution is vaccination. However, in the very short term even that won’t be good enough, we need to break the 4th wave and for that contact reduction is necessary (and already happening).
Think about time frames.
Contact reduction, will show its effects within a couple weeks, vaccination mandates plus a logistical push for booster vaccinations, will show their effects within one month to three months, making healthcare more resilient in general, will show its effects within a couple of years, maybe a decade.