I'm not convinced that the current political climate in either Europe or America is prepared to do that.
This is already an accurate description of most fire departments and militaries around the world. It shouldn’t be too hard to accept that a similar necessity of spare capacity occurs for healthcare.
BLS says there are 334K at firefighters at $49k/yr.
There are 240k NPs at $113k/ye, 3M RNs at $71k/yr, 728K licensed nurses at $46k/yr, 300K lab techs at $52k/yr, and 1.5M NAs at $28k/yr. Go ahead and double that coat when you include MDs and Admin.
Ideally we want someone on a ventilator to be in an ICU and under a doctor's supervision, but in a crisis you can put a ventilator anywhere. A patient with COVID-19, will likely spend about 2 weeks on a ventilator.
Unfortunately, there are only about 60-70,000 mechanical ventilators in the entire US (and maybe double that if you include older less automated ones), and about half of them are for neonatal wards. [source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215).
10% of COVID-19 infections require mechanical ventilation. [source](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT04244591).
This means that if the US encountered an outbreak on the scale of what is happening in China, then we would also quickly run out of ventilators, and the mortality rate would be 2-4x what it would be otherwise, rather than the 1-2% mortality rate everyone is expecting.
The Diamond ~~Princess~~ Petri Dish Experiment, shows that at least 218 out of 3700 people are susceptible ( > 5.9% ).
If we knew how many of these would eventually need respirators then we could estimate a lower bound on respirators for a 330M population.
Working the other way around: 33000 respirators / 330M = 1 / 10 0000
so if 5.9% gets infected and we can only give 0.01% a respirator, then at most 0.17% of covid-positive people can be given a respirator.
This assumes they all need their respirators simultaneously (pessimistic) but also assumes the Petri Disk experiment stays at 5.9% (optimistic)
EDIT: what kind of query did you use to find the number of respirators in the US? How can I find similar numbers for European countries? How hard is it do DIY a respirator?
If we look at the international statistics for dead and serious / critical people per confirmed case, and interpret that as the fraction needing a respirator we get:
22 / 523 = 4.2% of covid-positives seem to need respirators
So we expect 4.2% * 5.9% = 0.25% of the population to neeed a respirator, while we only have enough for 0.01%, so assuming perfect triage of who needs it and who doesnt, 24 out of 25 who actually need one won't get one.
It seems like we really are heading to a CFR of 4.2% * 24 / 25 such that there will be at least > 5.9% * 4.2% * 24 / 25 deaths, where the 5.9% can only rise depending on Diamond Princess evolution...
so if containment fails it looks like 4.2% * 9.6% = ~ 0.4% of the population at large would die.
I feel like I'm missing something. What does this have to do with javascript libraries? Or does the JS stand for something else?
It goes without saying, that this is meant without any offense whatsoever