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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

So uh, maybe we decide that life doesn’t need to be permanently centered around Covid and just move on?

And realistically that is what society will do. Move on. There are infinitely more problems in the world than just Covid. Solving for exactly Covid to the exclusion of literally everything else is complete madness. Any rational person will tell you that. Life is to short to maintain a Covid centric lifestyle… life is meant to be lived.

Oh yeah, and we’ve been wringing our hands about hospital capacity for 2 years now. Perhaps we should ask why there isn’t any effort at all into increasing it? Forcing society to do all these restrictions to “protect hospitals” while doing fuck all to increase capacity is also madness… perhaps hospitals are actually just fine? If they were actually “full” why has nothing been done to address the problem? This is an emergency, right?

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> Oh yeah, and we’ve been wringing our hands about hospital capacity for 2 years now. Perhaps we should ask why there isn’t any effort at all into increasing it?

Yeah seriously, it’s been two years, why haven’t we doubled the number of doctors and nurses by now? Just add more conveyor belts to our factorio.

You could start by not laying off workers who refuse to get vaccinated.

You know, the same workers who have been on the front lines exposed to the virus for two years and have unquestionably developed immunity. Forcing mandates onto them is insanity. They are not spreading covid.

That is just an excuse though. Figure it out. It’s an emergency. You don’t get to throw up your hands and say it’s impossible. Figure it out. It’s been two years. Where is the hospital capacity to manage this huge emergency?

Doubling something to fight an enemy that can grow exponentially? Good luck with that...

Also I recommend reading a bit about what working on a covid unit is like - it's hell on many levels. Even just the ammount of death and personal tragedies they witness is insane and easily PTSD inducing.

Increasing hospital capacities is almost pointless because new cases will be exponential. So doubling your ICU-capacities (which is extremely difficult to do, mainly because you don't have the staff) will buy you two-three weeks until the hospital is full again.

It peaks though, and comes back down. Every. Single. Time. Regardless of interventions.

The real world can't sustain exponential growth for too long, other limiting factors come in to play.

It's enough for the peak to swamp the hospitals over capacity for a week or two and the result will be very deadly, even just for non covid related cases.

Why has this literally never happened anywhere?

You mean why nobody doubled hospital capacity? (Easier said than done, and doesn't buy you much at all?)

Or why exponential growth didn't happen? (It did?)

Or why hospitals were never at capacity? (Because measures were taken to prevent specifically that exact scenario?)

Spoken like an able-bodied individual of young(er) age and/or someone with zero co-morbidities. Fuck the rest, eh?

He said what most poor people have been saying the entire time. They're willing to take the risk, because the risk is lower than all the other problems they have now.

Now, the question is: should you care what poor people say?

People from lower socio-economic backgrounds are statistically more predisposed to develop co-morbidities.

Interesting that this uncomfortable truth is downvoted but not refuted. Please show me a study that disproves this. Before anyone says the onus is on me to prove it, you can do a quick google and see for yourself.

So what do you do with the infected people that turn up at the overcrowded hospital? Let them die on the street?

Overall COVID19 mortality is still around 2%. In Germany, for example, we currently have 100k deaths. That would increase fivefold if you let every currently unvaccinated person get infected, and that's assuming we can provide the same level of care for all of them (i.e. hospitals are not over capacity).

> Perhaps we should ask why there isn’t any effort at all into increasing it?

  - Building hospitals generally takes more than 1.5 years.

  - Training nurses does too, although at least there is some elasticity in supply.

  - Mortality among patients hospitalized with COVID 19 is around 10%. Keeping them out of the hospital in the first place is much more effective than increasing hospital capacity.

> Overall COVID19 mortality is still around 2%.

It’s not even close to that. Not even in the same ballpark.

According to the graphs on worldometers.info for Germany (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/):

> Oct 30 2020: 10.5k total deaths, 517k total cases

> Dec 01 2021: 101k total deaths, 5.9 mil total cases

So in the last ~year, we had 5.4 mil cases and 90.5k deaths. That's a 1.67% mortality.

Please show me the error. Also, feel free to engage with the other points I made.

If you are almost 2 years into this and don’t know why IFR is a more valid metric than CFR, I doubt the media, nor the policy makers, nor most of the “experts” don’t either.

The profound lack of understanding the reams and reams of raw data surrounding Covid… no wonder people are scared.

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