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yread

Even bigger news is that as of yesterday there were just 46 free ICU beds (out of 1300+) in the whole London

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What’s the status of nightingale? In use or not?

They got shut down, the one at Excel had like 4 patients in it and a handful of nurses.

Doesn't exist anymore :)

The article says it will be opened and used again.

When?

It's been quietly resupplied with everything except staff, from what I can tell from a civil servant friend.

Which makes it of limited use.

From the article "These would be complemented by 1,000 “step down beds”, some of the supplied by the opening of the capital’s Nightingale hospital," so sounds like it's not in use yet.

The big problem with the nightingale hospitals is that there were no staff to run them, and hospitals are understaffed as it is with people of sick or isolating due to the governments approach of vaccinating their voters first ahead of medical staff.

Even if they were used in the first wave it was in the expectation that any hospitals sending patients there would also send staff to look after them, which was never realistic.

You can hire a hall and stick a bed in it, but if there’s no one to look after the sick person in it they don’t have much of a chance.

I still think they were really intended to be overflow morgues rather than proper hospitals, or at least solely palliative.

You can't build a hospital like that in a week, and there are no staff.

They are unfit for use as hospitals and you're right, there's no staff, hospitals around the country alone are struggling. There's no adequate places to even wash your hands due to toilets located sparsely in unsuitable places.

I've worked in Nightingale (London) and am on standby for Nightingale North West if needed. Luckily I didn't have to deal with any patients there and I hope we don't again.

Is there any context to that number? I’d be very interested in seeing how many beds were free this day in 2019, 2018, etc. It’s not a secret that hospitals are designed to run at or near capacity at all times, I don’t know where the notion that hospitals run at 40% capacity at all times in order to account for the random once-in-a-century pandemic comes from.

There's a link in a sibling comment pointing to data from 2019 January where 151 out of 1033 adult critical care beds in London were free (14.6%), and in January 2020 146 out of 1034 were free

Even now ICU utilization nationwide in the United States is only ~63% [1]. Regardless of country, ICUs are not supposed to be run at capacity as a matter of practice - the staffing level in ICUs is on the order of one to three people per patient and it's not a resource that can be scaled up or down quickly.

For a large metro area like London, you might have some hospitals at high utilization because they're very close to other ICUs and can redirect incoming patients. It's not supposed to be at high utilization regionally, otherwise a single minor disaster can cause the system to tailspin.

[1] https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-capacity

Comparisons to previous years don't really make sense. ICU capacity should have somewhat increased and in previous years they weren't anticipating such a massive influx of new patients.

So like usual around this time then

Dunno why you're downing me but... The data is all here https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...

That data shows 151 free out of 1033 adult critical care beds in London in January 2019 (14.6% free)

And there's 300 extra beds now, right?

I can't find that data. I did find daily statistics for "Total beds - occupied by confirmed COVID-19 patients (as at 08:00)"[0], which from the 1st to 6th of January is the following sequence:

5511 5861 6358 6733 6816 7034

So apparently increasing rapidly

[0]: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...

I think the important difference is that the situation is expected to get worse. While this may seem normal, it is a peak as the cause will have stopped by now and the lead time is short. In this case, the fallout from Christmas and New Years is just starting to hit.

ICU capacity is ALWAYS at or close to 100% in Canada's most populated province in ALL YEARS. Many of the beds have people in them for months.

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