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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

In the US the nation-wide ICU vacancy is down to pre-pandemic levels. There may be anecdotes of individual hospitals that have a lot of COVID patients in ICU, but it's simply not true that this is a wide spread problem.

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It's funny that people read the same data with such different interpretations. This is why I feel like the insistence of "just look at the data" rarely leads to a clear decision, and anyone working at a company that has dealt with giving data to people to make decisions will know this intimately. People use data to make their point, and if the data doesn't agree, then they slice it or adjust it or reason their way out of using it, so they can make the decision they want. I think Scott Adams calls it "watching the same screen, but seeing two different movies"

There are several problems, but a big one is just the way the news works. ICUs are designed to run at near capacity and are overwhelmed all the time if, for example, there's a big car accident. Right now, all eyes are on the pandemic and I'm sure it's true that there's places in the country where ICUs are full up with pandemic patients. But the way the news cycle works, "ICUs at capacity with COVID patients" gets a lot more clicks than "ICUs in this hospital are always at capacity, but now they are at capacity with COVID."

Also, there's been a couple of big hoaxes that have circulated like the one about how ERs were full of Ivermectin ODs and they were turning away car accident victims.

Here's the actual real-time-ish data of ICUs for the country:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...

Right now the national average for ICUs is 68% occupancy. Also from that article:

>The national average I.C.U. occupancy in 2010 was 67 percent, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, though the occupancy baseline changes depending on the place, time of year and size of hospital.

I mean, big car accidents don't happen across multiple states at the same time, it isn't that surprising that the response to something happening super-regionally is different than the response to something happening locally.

Did you miss this part?

>I'm sure it's true that there's places in the country where ICUs are full up with pandemic patients.

No, I didn't miss it, I was responding to the cynicism about "the news cycle", that's why I pointed out that a pandemic is a different sort of thing than a car accident.

If you are operating at your normal capacity factor but have reason to predict that you are on a trajectory to be completely overwhelmed along with every hospital within reasonable driving distance, it's different than if you are operating at your normal capacity factor and have to send a patient or two to the nearest hospital with more spare capacity.

Your response would make sense if we were still in the first months of the pandemic when there was serious risk of overrunning the hospitals.

Covid is still very real. And there are still very real risks. But this fear of overrun ICUs is irrational nonsense. We are back to pre-pandemic ICU utilization. And we have been since before the Delta variant hit.

The head internist at my local hospital participated in a news story about how everyone that works there is sick of it all just last month. This is at a small hospital that usually deals with a few patients at a time. They've had periods where they had limited space and couldn't make transfers since Delta hit.

But maybe the media called every hospital in the state to find her or something.

We are scraping by with the measures we do have in place, we can't use the fact that we are successfully scraping by as evidence that we have too many measures in place.

It's simply dishonest for you or anyone else to pretend like COVID filling up ICUs is a wide spread problem. There may be anecdotes of it being true in a particular hospital or community. But nationwide we are back to pre-pandemic occupancy levels.

I don't understand why you extrapolated that data to suggest something about how many measures we have in place. Is your position that we should lie to the public so they will do what you want?

I feel like we are talking past each other and you are putting words in my mouth (and calling me a liar), so whatever.

ICUs typically run around 85% occupancy and up. At 68% it is difficult to pay the bills.

People have a hard time accepting that we are no longer in the early panic stage of the pandemic. Any data that suggests we can ratchet down the anxiety driven fear porn a couple points will be dismissed.

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