“Seems like we should buy another 100,000 at $500 = $50 million.”
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https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
“Around 20% of cases require hospitalization, 5% of cases require the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and around 2.5% require very intensive help, with items such as ventilators or ECMO (extra-corporeal oxygenation).
The problem is that items such as ventilators and ECMO can’t be produced or bought easily. A few years ago, the US had a total of 250 ECMO machines, for example.
So if you suddenly have 100,000 people infected, many of them will want to go get tested. Around 20,000 will require hospitalization, 5,000 will need the ICU, and 1,000 will need machines that we don’t have enough of today. And that’s just with 100,000 cases.”
Also the requirement of a ventilator brings with it the requirement of the personnel capable of its administration - a critical care nurse.
On the ECMO, maybe the bottleneck is not the machine.
The ECMO machine is similar to the heart-lung by-pass machine.
How many worker bees in the medical industry are qualified to prepare, attach, monitor, and detach this sort of equipment? How many man-hours involved?
Some of the figures and logic seem out of thin air, or not following one another. For example, “if you suddenly have 100,000 people infected, many of them will want to go get tested.” How do we know they are infected with COVID if they are not tested? How do we know 20% of COVID infectees require hospitalization? That 5% require ICU? Some medical official in Ohio, I don;t know her name, claims 100,000 people in Ohio are presently infected. She gets that on some sort of guessing on community spread characteristics and the way the herd has been behaving. Not speaking to the truth of her figure, it’s 1% of the population of the state, just pointing out there is much we don’t know, and are making policy based on speculation.