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Comment by j0057 | Hacker News Reader

The same is said in the Netherlands, but if you double the number of available IC beds, with associated staff (good luck with that), all you've bought yourself is two weeks before those are full as well – because of exponential growth.

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Growth isn't exponential forever, cases appear to be going down again in Germany already. Delta waves seem to be only about 8 weeks long (check data from different countries, or here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/briefing/delta-peak-covid...), so two extra weeks would help a lot.

I agree that vaccines are part of the solution. I disagree that stripping citizens of their rights and insulting them on TV is part of literally any solution for anything. If a government feels the urge to do that, it should look for alternatives instead. Maintaining ICU capacity from one year before (decreased by 4000 in 2021, see: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihenht... - "Gesamtzahl gemeldeter Intensivbetten"), is the lowest-hanging fruit, I'm sure there are additional alternatives that I'm not qualified to comment on.

Edit: It was pointed out to me that the DIVI numbers have some complexity that I did not account for. So grain of salt on the actual ICU number, but I've not yet seen anyone deny the trend. Here's a fact check that confirms that beds were lost: https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2021/11/17/divi-praesident...

I’ll not take a stance on the correct number of free ICU beds as I do not feel qualified to judge these numbers without more insight on the intricacies of what would qualify fully operational beds, but regarding the stalling case numbers I feel confident enough (after looking at some raw numbers from the municipalities themselves [1]) to dismiss the apparent trend as a statistic artifact.

PCR test units and hospital bureaucracy are past their limits - e.g. regions like Bonn, Essen or Recklinghausen reporting zero cases on multiple consecutive days (Nov 29, Nov 30), which is _very_ unlikely w.r.t. the case numbers of the surrounding regions and those very regions reporting more than one hundred cases today.

The published indicators do not count cases that are reported late [2], which leads to apparently stalling case numbers. Growths may not be exponential forever but given that roughly one quarter of the population is not vaccinated, I would not take bets that the virus runs out of hosts before the health care system collapses.

I agree to the sentiment made that the balance between economic efficiency and damaging austerity for profit margin gains in the German health care system (especially for worker’s loans) has been tipping way too far to the latter in the past decades.

[1] https://www.lzg.nrw.de/covid19/download/laborbest_faelle_sar... (updated each day at 0:00 CET)

[2] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

edit: some formatting.

Yeah, it's possible. I tried to word it carefully. There seems to be a trend in Bavaria though, Saxony maybe, but it's too soon to tell. Those two were the first to be hit by the current wave, and some areas of Bavaria had the highest incidence for a decent while I believe, so that might be an indicator of having reached the peak at least in some parts of the country. But you are correct, it's absolutely not clear yet, and could be due to lack of testing capacity.

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