And few non critical care beds:
Posted on 03/15/2020 1:09:56 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
Unlike China and others who impart an aggressive multifaceted approach to curb the spread, Italy seems to think the right approach is to leave the virus alone, let it burn itself out on its own free will. Let’s see where that approach will leave them. Yes, some will survive with antibodies, but there will be a whole lot of bodies to bury by the time the raging fire storm burns out.
You hope
Fearful is the correct word.
And few non critical care beds:
[Convenient all these deaths are attributed to C19 and we aren’t told the demographics]
When MSNBC starts reporting on Russian Collusion with Trump again.
The health care system will be overrun in the first month or so of an epidemic. That is why China had a surge of deaths during that period. Countries don’t maintain large amounts of slack capacity in their health care systems, because that slack costs massive amounts of money, due to expensive facilities, equipment and staff. Once the scale of the epidemic becomes apparent, the government spends massively to meet the need for expanded emergency care. As patients start getting treated instead of turned away, the number of deaths starts to decline.
Italy is at the stage where they’re turning away non-virus related patients who are accident or stroke victims. And they’re turning away covid-19 patients over 65 with underlying health conditions. Not a real surprise that their death rates are high. Once newly appropriated emergency funds course through the Italian health care system, and new ICU beds become available to completely fill the need caused by this pandemic, the daily count of covid-19 deaths should start to fall. But that might take a month from now to fully play out, if the Chinese example is anything to go by.
What the Italian quarantine measures are attempting to do is slow the rate of infection to minimize the number of new infections while the Italian medical system is catching up to what the new funding provides for, in terms of ICU capacity. New facilities can be requisitioned and equipment can be manufactured quickly. Doctors and nurses don’t materialize out of thin air. It would not surprise me if cash bounties were posted for hiring trained personnel from other countries as well as for retired personnel to come back to work. Medical and nursing students might be drafted to help in order to ease the shortage of trained personnel. Half-trained but carefully filtered through a battery of tough admissions exams is better than untrained:
* Whether the bug is new to bats is a different question, but this may not matter, from the bats’ perspective - it’s like water rolling off a duck’s back. Apparently, bats have sort of unique immune systems due to the filthy conditions that they live in (caves that are knee deep in shit). Rather than fighting off viruses their immune system sort of calls a truce with them. Otherwise they would exhaust themselves in eternal battle.
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Interesting. I had an Italian friend explain to me that several years ago, the EU put local-content rules on high-end couture, which was increasingly being made in China. As a result, Italy just imported Chinese workers.
When these workers returned to Italy after Chinese New Year this year, the virus exploded.
I was looking for more information on this.
I saw that about non-critical care beds and didn’t post it because it’s even more complicated than ICU beds.
What constitutes a non ICU bed? Does a cot in the broom closet count? Also many countries have high quality rooms but discharge when care absolutely isn’t needed and move them to a lower cost facility. Others that have cheap hospital rooms (lessor care) have many rooms and don’t move them out so quickly. It’s comparing apples and oranges.
ICU beds are more consistent at least the level of care is somewhat the “same”. Or at the very least it’s the high end of that systems care.
Minimum would seem be a ventilator. But definitions may vary by country. What a data collator may miss are these crucial differences.
Without individual country visits to nail the details down, the ICU statistics may be worthless - the differences may be so extensive as to render direct comparisons pointless.
Interesting. I had an Italian friend explain to me that several years ago, the EU put local-content rules on high-end couture, which was increasingly being made in China. As a result, Italy just imported Chinese workers.
Low-end couture, too. This is a long standing industry practice. When I lived in San Francisco in the ‘90s I had an office in a building with an entire floor that was a Chinese “sweat shop” producing “Made in the USA” garments.
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Seems to me our priority should be to manufacture as many cheap respirators as possible as soon as possible.
Well I know what icu means in the USA. And we have the most. I bet most first world countries have similar icu definitions. So it’s not meaningless.
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