[Slyfox]

There are over 6,000 hospitals in the United States. Why are they sending all the COVID people to just a few hospitals? Are none of the other hospitals able to handle flu and flu-like cases?

I smell a rat.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

200,000 new cases a day, 5% of them will require hospitalization (10,000). It flares up in specific regions at a given time, so maybe 1/6 of the hospitals - at most - are actually getting patients. Takes 2-3 weeks for recovery. Assuming perfectly spread patient load (which we know isn’t happening), that’s over 200 patients per hospital on top of normal workloads and 126 of them will be in the ICU for those hospitals.

For massive medical complexes, that might not be a huge deal, but smaller hospitals can easily get overwhelmed even when they’re sending home or turning away some of the less ill/injured patients.