>>12370179Hospitals have limited capacity and the medical infrastructure has evolved to deal with the regular common pressures the system faces.
A sudden and unique additional pressure from the pandemic threatens to overrun our healthcare system. I live in a region with provision to a population of 1.5 million people. Yesterday there were 3 ICU spaces available to serve that population. General bed availability across the whole system was at zero. So a small number of acute respiratory cases can tip the system into chaos. If that happens (it just can't be allowed to reach this) it would be a fucking horror show.
There are legitimate concerns about measures but it's complex. Eg:
We talk about cancer patients waiting for treatment, delayed interventions etc but its the very stretching of capacity that is limiting those interventions.
I hear people complain about this while protesting against mask use.
But if you actually give a fuck about cancer patients or others then we should do the simple things that limit spread of the virus, like washing hands, avoiding social mixing and wearing masks.
Higher compliance on these simple measures = fewer or shorter lock down periods = fewer of the negative impacts associated with lockdown.
There's really no solution with an acceptable outcome, it's unfortunately a case of trying to make the situation the least bad it can be.
There's a few other pertinent issues. Death isn't the only negative outcome. There are many who are experiencing disability effects of infections, left living with liver damage, kidney damage, reduced lung function, pulmonary scarring, long periods of recovery and senescence, and many more issues.
On the survivability stats above, looking purely at deaths: Those numbers appear good but in comparison to other pathologies that we ALL just accept as dangerous these figures are relatively high. Even compared to survivability with something like cancer Rona affects a far higher number so death numbers are higher.
