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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

That’s a weird way to phrase your second paragraph, considering hospitals have been close to full very recently in parts of the us.

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

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Hospital beds were "maxed out" before the pandemic. [0] at around 64%. They are sitting at around 78% on average now, with hard hit areas at around 80-85% according to your link. These are almost all at-risk and unvaccinated people. That's my point. If mandates and lockdowns are based on case counts instead of actual dire outcomes, then I fear we're going to continue seeing strange policies and laws for people at little to no risk, namely children and the vaccinated.

[0] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200326/us-hospital-beds-we...

Apparently there was a flu epidemic during 2017-2018 and hospitals were being overwhelmed by flu patients [1].

[1] https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

2017-2018 was an unusually deadly flu season:

> More than 80,000 Americans died of the flu in the winter of 2017-2018, the highest number in over a decade, federal health officials said last week. Although 90 percent of those deaths were in people over age 65, the flu also killed 180 young children and teenagers, more than in any other year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began using its current surveillance methods.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/health/flu-deaths-vaccine...

Other contemporaneous reporting:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/health/flu-rates-deaths.h...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/health/flu-symptoms-virus...

Meanwhile:

> Overall, more than 771,000 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the U.S. during the pandemic. About 385,000 were reported in 2020, according to CDC data, and more than 386,000 have been reported this year.

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211122/us-covid-deaths-202...

So 2021 alone has nearly 5x the Covid19 deaths as the 2017-2018 flu season. Also:

> As of last Monday, nine hospitals in Michigan were 100 percent full (https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98159-5236...), and at least 20 others were at or above 90 percent capacity. Statewide, nearly one in four hospital patients (https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/michigan-hosp...) has a confirmed or suspected case of Covid-19. In the last few weeks, my hospital has been consistently at or near capacity and nearly every day the vast majority of those patients are sick with Covid-19. Nearly all have been unvaccinated.

> On some shifts, the stress in the air is palpable. My colleagues and I know the patients are piling up, but there just are not enough nurses to properly triage everyone. A patient experiencing heart failure waits in an emergency room because inpatient rooms upstairs are all occupied. Patients who need surgery can’t be transferred because nearly every hospital within a two-hour drive is near or at capacity, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/opinion/covid-michigan-su...

Hospitals are not designed to be empty, though. So you can’t just point to 80% full ICU beds and say a hospital is overwhelmed. Is there any data showing ICU beds filled above carrying capacity? Or number of patients transferred to a different hospital due to bed shortage?

This is the reported situation here in Minnesota as of yesterday: “Statewide, nearly 98% of adult ICU beds and 95% of overflow, observation, and active surge/expansion beds for adults were occupied, according to the state Department of Health.”

Likewise, hospital are routinely denying transfers. I’m also not sure what “above carrying capacity” would mean here. They’re not sticking two to a bed.

Even in countries with fairly good covid situation (I'm in Finland) we are going to see excess mortality over the coming years, because right now as we speak, elective operations for heart surgeries and cancer operations are being postponed in order to make room for covid patients.

ICU wards are designed for normal operations at near-full capacity. Maintaining a large-scale vacant ICU capacity is both uneconomical and operationally very difficult (because ICU treatment skills are highly specific and learning, maintaining and updating them requires one to be working on the area).

This will show up as excess mortality of "preventable deaths".

But those stats will be overshadowed by 2 larger factors:

1. the pendulum will swing back as covid goes to zero .. fewer unhealthy and elderly members of the population will result in overall lower mortality rates in the short term (2-3 years).

2. baby boomers are coming of age .. a baby boom is eventually followed by a death boom. This will drive up the mortality rate long term (5-10 years).

In Germany wr have evacuatiom flights from Bavaria to Hamburg for example. We had that early in the pandemic from France and Italy to Germany. So yes, there are numbers for sure somewhere.

Sure, but I'm willing to bet most of the hospitalised are not vaccinated, or at least a disproportionate amount of them aren't vaccinated

How much are you willing to bet? Keep in mind that if the population is 90% vaccinated, you expect something approaching 90% of ICU beds to be vaccinated (well, with an effective and sterilizing vaccine you wouldn’t expect this, but that’s not where we are).

In England last month, 79% of Covid deaths were vaccinated. Currently about 36% of hospitalizations are unvaccinated.

The raw data is here, good luck parsing anything useful out of it: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

A majority of deaths in the winter months will be elderly people with underlying health conditions that might have died from a flue or cold virus if covid was not circulating. It's more interesting to see excess deaths for this winter. I have a hunch excess death rates will be similar to 2019.

I don't think so, but we can quite well follow it up here, for most developed and semi-developed countries.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

(As OWID relies on official data sources, they may be skewed or manipulated for undeveloped or autocratic countries)

Not really. With population vaccination rate nearly 90 % we have something approaching 30-40 % of hospital and ICU bed users vaccinated.

The risk of ending up on ICU is about 30 x higher here, when comparing similar demographics. Risk of needing to go to hospital is 19 x higher currently.

The UK is interesting in that only about 70% of the population is fully vaccinated, which seems to be less than the proportion of Covid-releated deaths that were fully vaccinated. This isn't because the Covid vaccines are ineffective at preventing death - it's just that age has a much bigger effect than vaccination on someone's risk of dying from Covid, and the high-risk age groups are almost 100% vaccinated whereas the lowest risk are largely unvaccinated.

Yes, and generally the age risk is so high that proper assessments must be done comparing age cohorts, not the entire population vax/unvax rates.

I've been trying to get a clear answer to this for some time, because at least in Switzerland, and apparently in other countries as well, vaccination status of hospitalizations and deaths is well published, while vaccination status of ICU occupants is reported only anecdotally.

As you say, a sizable percentage of deaths (~50% in the 60+ age group) are vaccinated — because those tend to skew elderly (85 in Switzerland) and highly vaccinated (>90%).

Likewise, a sizable percentage of hospitalizations (~40% in 60+) are vaccinated — those are a bit younger (66 in Switzerland) because many of the very elderly patients never make it to a hospital.

All the ICU administrators I've seen interviewed, however, say that their ICU occupants are ~90% unvaccinated. One explanation for this might be that the ICU median age is considerably younger than the above ages, about 55 in Switzerland, and younger population groups are less vaccinated.

But IF this is in fact the case, I wish the statistics were public.

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