It would be interesting to run some estimates. How many hospitals do we have? Say 60,000 give or take? With almost a million beds. How many “blue people” per hour can a hospital manage and still function? 6? 60? I’m guessing no American hospital can continue to function with one blue patient per minute. Let’s take half that because I know of many hospitals that couldn’t handle one an hour. 30 times 60,000 is what? 1.8 million? We can probably handle 100,000 new cases of seriously ill people a day but somewhere between that number and multiples of that number there could be massive social dislocation.
It’s like piloting a star ship. You have to look out the back window to obtain navigational data. We won’t know what any of the real numbers are until we see what the death count is in three weeks. Let’s hope we can keep the “new cases per day” of really ill people South of 10,000. I don’t pretend to know and all my numbers are just made up but I don’t see anybody having this discussion.
Everybody touts our heath system as the best in the universe but nobody is willing to find out if this is true. Let’s sit back and watch it in action.
That was were my thinking was.
We closed everything to spread out the infection rate to not overwhelm the Hospital system. If Hospitals get overwhelmed, death rate goes up by ~10X. Appears maybe based on # of sick, that we got a jump on that maybe.
So based on infection positive, sick & dead, rates - WHEN DOES the SHTF? 3 weeks???
When does the ALL CLEAR sound and we go back to normal - 2 months??
Is hot summer weather what we need? As this becomes a super infectious late Flu season?
There are 5,000 hospitals in this country. Not 60,000.