We managed to build giant ships in like 3 or 6 months in WWII. I'm pretty sure we could figure out how to staff 400 or so ICU's with people capable of managing sick covid patients. It might be all these people know how to do... but we could do it. We have almost unlimited resources to do so.
Somehow I remain unconvinced that "thinking outside the box" conjures doctors and nurses into existence or makes those who refuse to work ICUs suddenly interested in the job. I guess you could demand the military have doctors and nurses work at the point of a gun, all so John Q. Public probably still couldn't go to Target without a mask on two years hence. That sounds great.
Then fucking draft them into working in an ICU like you would draft somebody into a war. Build a second story on their house. I don't care. This shit is an existential emergency where we asked hundreds of millions of people to put 2 years of their life on hold to build healthcare up. Figure it out. If healthcare capacity was the reason we did all this, then we should have poured the entire nation's worth of resources into building healthcare capacity. Period.
It is absolutely inexcusable to continue playing the "healthcare might collapse" card 2 years into this. If people used this many excuses back in WWII we'd have lost the damn war. "Oh, it takes 4 years to design a build a ship... sorry. we can't just pull ships out of our butt. Guess we will just have to let them win". Bullshit. We made it happen. We could make it happen for this too.
This is supposed to be an emergency, remember? Every second you have people in lockdown is a second of each of those peoples very short lives you've now wasted. Figure it out!
They have a moral obligation to not waste my life... which they completely did. Why there aren't riots on the street over the fact that the public is still being blamed for not "taking this seriously" is beyond me. Get fucked, dudes--y'all had 2 years to figure this out.
For me personally it shows it isn't that serious as the fear mongering would like us to be believe
Okay, and who does their job? I mean "no-one can get chemotherapy because the oncology department was told to go work in the ICU" probably isn't a great outcome, either.
ICU capacity can, and in many countries has, been expanded to some extent. But you're not realistically going to 10x it or anything; the main area of concentration has to be reducing the demand on it in the first place (via vaccination, pre-hospital treatment, public safety measures, and, as a last resort, lockdowns).
Vaccination was the end goal because it would mean we could reduce all that emergency capacity we were supposed to build up. Non pharmacutical interventions like masks, social distancing and lockdowns for healthy people are extreme asks and should be used for extremely short durations while you pour your nations entire pool of resources into building healthcare capacity up.
What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals. The fact that all of these were shutdown virtually unused after a month but we continued with all these stay-at-home orders shows exactly how little respect these "experts" and government officials have for the general public. The day those things closed was the day we should have gone back to full normal. That these "experts" doubled down on this crap is so immoral and unethical it amazes me people continued to support it.
That is, of course, far too few (Where is that? I've never heard of a ratio _that_ low for a developed country). But unfortunately, the time to fix it was about five years before it became a major crisis.
> You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.
With what staff?
> What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals.
As far as I can see, those were envisaged as a solution to a regional problem; if covid was only a big problem in a few regions, then this could work via redeployment of staff, drawing on limited reserves of staff (military, bringing people back from retirement, and so on). In practice, very few countries managed to maintain covid as a regional problem, so temporary hospitals became less interesting because _you can't staff them_.
It’s 100% excuses. If healthcare capacity was an actual issue we’d have fixed it already and gone back to pre-pandemic normal.
Covid itself had 0 impact on my life, I don't know a single person that died of it. All the suffering come from restrictions.
It's ok if you have a super boring life without friend or family, never doing anything out or traveling but at least have empathy for others that got miserable because of all those undue restrictions.
That being said, it sucking is not the same as years being wasted. You still have opportunities to do plenty of other stuff. The only reason these years would be wasted is if you do not try to adapt. Are they going to be among the best years of your life? Probably not. Are they necessarily wasted and "stolen"? No.
Covid having a low impact on your life personally is missing the mark on a couple of levels. The low impact might very well be connected to the restrictions in place. In an alternate timeline where restrictions never happened, you might have been equally or more frustrated over the lack thereof as you lost a loved one.
How do you quantify how much discomfort for the general public is worth it to save X amount of lives? You and yours might have gotten dealt a shitty hand because of the border shutdowns, but on the aggregate I think the restrictions have been reasonable.
This is a much better way of describing my reaction to these claims. I appreciate you making it soberly.
There are absolutely folks who've been dealt a rough hand over the last two years--but I certainly wouldn't call my life "boring", and somehow I've figured out ways to make the last two years two of the best of my life: building a wood shop, getting away from the computer more, learning more about myself. And while I'll go back to traveling, etc. once things settle down, I have learned that I don't have to go places to be fulfilled.
Focusing on what one can't do is probably a great way to have made the last two years suck, though.
Drafting people for war works fine because, for the most part in those situations, you're handing someone a gun and telling them to be a meat shield. A similar approach to treating the sick at home is a bit more difficult.
> Dunno how because it ain't my expertise at all, but there would be a way.
What makes you so sure?
It isn't like this staff has to treat anything else.
Just an idea. Like I said, I'm no expert but the fact that absolutely nobody has attempted to figure it out is bullshit. They haven't even tried. They just keep throwing out excuse after excuse and blaming the public for their failures.
They literally have almost unlimited resources. They could get shit figured out somehow.
This doesn't really pass the sniff test. There are a LOT of different countries and states in the world, with a fairly wide variety of responses to Covid. I'm not aware of any country where they managed to magic up some hospitals fully staffed to handle Covid cases. If it didn't happen despite all the different societies that could have attempted it then it is far more likely that it was considered (and tried even!) and rejected as unworkable.
In other words, you are certainly not the first person to think "what if we just had more hospital beds and staff and throw heaps of money at it to make it happen". The reason no country (that I know of) has done this is because it is impractical. The alternative is a grand conspiracy involving collusion in hundreds of countries and states and their leaders, including all the departments of health and the various officials, in democratic countries, communist countries, authoritarian countries and so on, some of whom are literally at war with each other.
If there's one thing we should've learned from Corona, it's that this line of thinking is wrong. Even facing an emergency like a global pandemic, that has cost the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars of economic damage, most governments did a lot of things very obviously wrong. Clearly, emergencies don't suddenly cause politics to stop and politicians to act perfectly.