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Comment by sandos | Hacker News Reader

Reading this does bring back this feeling we constantly had during covid, that "its all pointless": The many rules about staying at home when sick, after being, when someone else is sick in the household: All these always felt somewhat arbitrary here in Sweden, and you always knew that you the rules did not guarantee no tranmission, and on top of that there was always the ones without symptoms. Which made all the rigor seems to unneccesary. We abided almost 100% to any rule, but I heard of alot of people who did not.

In the end, I don't think it changed anything, tranmissions till happened and would have happened.

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Hospitals were overflowing with patients. Millions died because they did not get timely treatment. In countries such as India, there wasn't even enough room to cremate bodies. Home quarantining "flattened the infection curve" enough to make this more manageable. So no, it wasn't all pointless.

In the United States, hospitals were not overflowing with patients and the curve was not flattened. It followed roughly the same curve and wave pattern of the 1918 pandemic. Hospitals were furloughing staff in massive quantities. Ohio tracked and published hospitalization rates and I followed them daily. There was never 100% capacity usage.

Not true for all of the US. In the SF Bay Area, at least, we had 100% occupancy rates for significant periods even after home quarantining was established.

I have been doing some digging and unfortunately cannot find data prior to mid 2020 for most areas. This site https://data.statesmanjournal.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity... has information pertaining to capacity since then, for an incredible amount of hospitals.

Looking at the data for the available time period, I am not able to confirm your statement.

I don’t see any history in the site. How are you getting history?

The fact that hospitals did run out of capacity in many places in the world is indication enough to me that control measures were important, and hospitals having some capacity is hardly a measure of safety.

In the left column, if you click on the hospital name, it will show the history.

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