I get you. It’s a terrible situation for the doctors to be in.
It could be. I pray it doesn’t happen. But the risk it could is very real. Like I keep saying, the “rate limiting factor”, the bottleneck, is acutely ill patients arriving in the ER. If we have 5,000 hospitals and most of them can’t handle over one an hour and only the really big ones could even try to handle ten an hour things could get messy.
It’s gonna be messy. Roughly, to over run every hospital in the country would take a huge number of new seriously ill every day. If we have 5,000 hospitals and 300 can take ten an hour and the rest can average 2 that’s less than 15,000 per hour. That’s 360,000 new cases a day. We will never have that many. Half that is 180,000 new cases a day. To generate that would require some 18 million new cases a day. To me this is obviously worst case scenario but i think it does indicate that there is an excellent chance even worst case we can do it. If the ER can do ten cases an hour and get them out in 5 days a thousand bed hospital could almost keep up. If it did nothing else.
We can do this. I wouldn’t want to be a nurse or doctor in the next month and a number will probably die but we can do this.
And before anyone gets snarky on my math, remember dead patients don’t require as much hospital days as recovered ones.