but there are only 17,660 cases or there around sick in italy. how could that be taking any system? This is the virus where no one is sick and there are two of them. one that is deadly and the other that is what Tom Hanks has mild cold symptoms. maybe there are more than one actual virus.
“This is the virus where no one is sick and there are two of them.”
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I’m sorry but you’re very uniformed. Google these words:
italy hospitals overwhelmed
and you’ll get a boatload of information about what’s going on and how it happened.
Here -
“And then there is the Italy problem. There, as in the U.S. and everywhere else, hospitals have limited capacity to treat patients with severe lung illnesses. If the health-care system gets overwhelmed with an enormous number of COVID-19 cases requiring intensive care, the quality of care will deteriorate and a larger fraction of patients will die than would die in a well-functioning health-care system. This is why people keep talking about the need to “flatten the curve”: Merely slowing the growth of the epidemic, even if it doesn’t reduce the ultimate number of cases, would lessen the pressure on the medical system is considerably. But as I have reported this story, I have gotten an increasingly sinking feeling about the “flatten the curve” discourse for reasons that have to do with the other variable in the table: the fatality rate per infection.
U.S. hospitals contain about 900,000 hospital beds, of which fewer than 100,000 are for critical care. Of course, most of those beds are already in use for people with other medical problems — U.S. hospitals admit approximately 36 million patients annually. If 165 million Americans ultimately contract the novel coronavirus, how much would we need to “flatten the curve” to fit all those who need hospital care into properly equipped beds to avoid a situation like in Italy, where patients are being denied treatment for lack of available resources?
Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me he believes that flattening the curve will only work to manage hospital capacity if the fatality rate from COVID-19 is on the low end of the range of estimates. “I was discussing this with a colleague, and I had been operating under the idea that maybe the infection fatality ratio was around one in a thousand,” Lessler told me. “And under that, things are very, very bad, but you can envision a world where we spread out the epidemic and slow it down and never overrun our ICU capacity.”