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Almost the exact trend in Canada. I hope this is just a quirk of the data, because we would be screwed for this in 2000, and being at least 20% more screwed means we're extra screwed.

In effect, it seems that in Canada have fewer overall hospital beds per capita than Italy has acute care beds.

We are completely unprepared, and in terms of time, not far behind Italy.

Warning tho with those statistics that are also to be found at Eurostat. Curative (acute) care beds are NOT ICU beds.

They're just normal hospital beds.

example, the netherlands have a total of around 1300 ICU beds (source https://healthmanagement.org/c/icu/issuearticle/organisation...).

the number there is 50k ... which is indeed about the amount of normal beds excluding ICU and other few specific beds.

That is a big factor. And: available nursing staff. Beds aren't enough. You need the right people to operate a large number of patients at the same time.

From what I read, medical equipment seems to be the bigger issue in parts of Italy right now. You can only convert beds to ICU if you have the right equipment. Nursing staff is obviously necessary but that doesn't appear to be the most limiting factor at the moment.

Italy has not yet reached the limit for ICU beds, whatever it is. People dying here is still within capacity, for now.

That disagrees with all the information that has been coming out of Italy for the last three days.

Perhaps because hospitals there (and in general) are always running at 80-100% capacity, so it didn't take much for the extra COVID-19 cases to max them out.

Indeed most EU ICU services are already usually running at around 90% with the usual issues (including the Flu). And please also do consider that most of theses cases are within the Lombardy region and that most ICU patients are very difficult if not impossible to transfer safely to other regions. While the ICU beds are limited, the amount of ambulances equipped with ICU equipment is probably even smaller (and will also require an ICU nurse+doctor on board during the transfer).

And then there is looming material shortage.

For instance, in my home town (Kraków, Poland), hospitals cancelled planned procedures yesterday - not due to the amount of COVID-19 patients itself (Poland still has double-digit number of reported cases), but because the hospitals run out masks, gowns and gloves. Which means that once coronavirus patients start appearing, things will get really ugly real fast.

I guess you mean the total national capacity, not the local capacity in the most affected towns?

Symptomatic patients are probably not going to be transferred over long distances, right?

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