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Oh OK. How many years will that take? You can't just staff these new hospitals with just new nurses, you need doctors and other support staff. We have a vaccine now. If everybody just got it when they could we could start to move on without spending millions or billions building new hospitals and paying people to train to become nurses and doctors in half a decade.

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China built a 1000 bed covid hospital in 10 days and staffed it with army nurses.

Compare this to requiring 330 million people to continually agree and coordinate basic pandemic behavior like masks and vaccines.

Costs are largely irrelevant. Perhaps 100 million for such a hospital. This is 0.0001% of the 6+ trillion the government has spent on other covid actions.

There's a reason China hasn't made this their strategy for the rest of the pandemic. It works as a stop-gap, if you accept low quality of care (read: high mortality) and if you're dealing with a regional outbreak where you can ship in resources from surrounding areas.

It's not going to work if the entire country, continent or planet is in the same situation.

Building hospitals isn't the problem; staffing them is. China was able to do this because that outbreak was a regional, not national, problem.

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