Hacker News Reader

Transporting an intubated patient hundreds of miles to an area not experiencing an outbreak and having a hospital equipped to deal with same is not a trivial task. Moreover, these numbers of ICU beds bandied about are meaningless. Zero, or close to, of those ICU beds are isolated (infection control).

Transporting a patient that sick requires a specially trained doctor and nurse, ambulance transfers to helipad/airport, an 8 hour+ return trip, and a high likelihood of giving the disease to a bunch of people at the new centre.

If you had all the resources spare to achieve that, you could just keep them probably.

There are very few resources dedicated to long distance patient transfer at the best of times. If you pulled away regularly ambulance services and somehow equipped them to handle infection control you'd barely be breaking out of the single digits of patient transfers on a good day.