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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

To clarify, the man didn't literally drive to 43 different hospitals. He was at a hospital that ran out of ICU beds. The patient's family claims the hospital called 43 different hospitals asking them to accept an ICU transfer, but could only find an open ICU bed in nearby Mississippi:

> It was so difficult, his family wrote this month, that the hospital in his hometown of Cullman, Ala., contacted 43 others in three states — and all were unable to give him the care he needed. DeMonia, who was eventually transferred to a Mississippi hospital about 200 miles away,

Note that the specific number (43) comes from an anecdote from the patient's family, not from official hospital spokespeople. Take it with a grain of salt.

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Link to Georgia EMT hospital status...bad time to be in a car wreck. https://georgiarcc.org/?sort=county&direction=asc

Oh my God you’re not kidding! Is this kind of information available for other hospital systems in America? A visualization of this data might be just the ingredient that is needed to deliver a sobering message.

https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization

You can find county and state level dashboards trivially with an internet search, but the above link is an aggregator provided by HHS.

According to that 100% of ICU beds in Alabama are taken with ~48% being COVID related. Wow.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alabama-covid-icu-beds/ (Alabama)

Hospitals in Alabama have run out of intensive care unit beds as coronavirus cases spike across the state, forcing workers to make space to treat patients as they wait for open beds. There were 29 more patients than ICU beds available as of Wednesday, an Alabama Department of Public Health spokesperson confirmed to CBS News.

Hospital staffers have been forced to convert hallways, regular patient rooms and emergency spaces into areas where they can treat patients in need of ICU rooms, CBS affiliate WHNT reported. Officials said some patients could be transferred to different hospitals when beds become available.

"We've never been here before. We are truly now in uncharted territory in terms of our ICU bed capacity," Dr. Don Williamson, president of the Alabama Hospital Association, told CBS affiliate WTVY.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/08/19/tenn... (Tennessee)

As the coronavirus continues to sweep Tennessee, all intensive care unit beds are currently full at most hospitals in every major metropolitan area in the state, according to the Tennessee Hospital Association.

“This means that if you or a loved one need treatment for any type of serious healthcare, problem like a severe injury, heart attack, or stroke, you may not be able to access the care you need, when you need it,” Long said in a statement on Thursday morning.

https://www.newsweek.com/georgia-icu-beds-now-95-percent-cap... (Georgia)

According to the health department, over 80 percent of emergency department beds are occupied throughout the state, while 86.6 percent of general inpatient beds are being used. Of the state's 14 regions, five are already over ICU capacity, with ICU beds in some parts of west Georgia reporting as high as 115.4 percent capacity, according to WSB-TV.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/12/mississippi... (Mississippi)

Mississippi braces for ‘failure’ of hospital system due to covid-19 surge and lack of ICU beds

A surge in coronavirus patients and a shortage of health-care workers and intensive care unit beds have pushed Mississippi’s hospital system to the brink of “failure,” state health officials warned Wednesday, saying drastic federal intervention was needed to help the state grapple with the thousands of new daily infections that have overwhelmed doctors and nurses.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mississippi-hospital-without... (Mississippi)

Memorial Hospital at Gulfport doesn't have enough ICU beds to house patients waiting for brain and heart surgeries, two staffers told Insider. The situation is so dire, the hospital has no choice but to cancel them. In the best case scenario, patients who need these surgeries might wait days to receive one, said Whitney Sutton, registered nurse and ICU manager at Memorial. Some will wait even longer, for periods of up to two weeks.

Not that I am Trump supporter (I was most definitely not), but when hospital capacity was expected to be overrun back in Q2-2020, didn’t Trump deploy USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy to NYC and LA? I don’t hear anything about the Biden administration doing this…I mean if it’s that bad—why aren’t these resources being deployed?

If you look at what actually happened when they were deployed it was pretty much a useless gesture. Negligible patients were treated.

Yes I realize that it wasn’t ultimately needed, it was a proactive measure. It’s better that it was there and unused than not there and needed. Wouldn’t you agree?

But here we have the exact opposite. We have reports about hospitals actually being stretched past their limits…and the ship is sitting in Virginia. Personally, I think that looks bad…and possibly politically punitive. And if I have that opinion as a liberal independent, I guarantee others probably see it that way too…especially if they lean Republican.

The problem is that an ICU bed isn't just a bed, it needs to be staffed. Without the staff to go with it you can put up as many beds as you want and call them ICU beds, it won't make a shred of a difference.

My suspicion is that a “hospital ship” is probably staffed with more than just the sailors who make it go from point a to point b.

I could be wrong…

Yes, you are wrong, it's not like those boats are permanently staffed, the staff is drawn from elsewhere.

Besides that the red-tape around those ships effectively denied those with COVID from coming on board resulting in a grand total of 35 patients treated over the two ships combined.

Effectively they were a net negative, if the staff assigned to the ships would have been made available to the hospitals on shore they would have been far more effective.

So use them to treat the non-Covid or deploy the staff to the land based hospitals. There are tactical relief actions this administration could take to help the overwhelmed hospitals but seems reluctant to do so. That bothers the hell out of me.

It sounds like the kind of number you would use hyperbolically to mean “a lot”.

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