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Comment by esistgut | Hacker News Reader

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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