article if you want non-COVID brain damage
As omicron sweeps through North America, the U.S. and Canadian responses couldn’t be more different. U.S. states are largely open for business, while Canada’s biggest provinces are shutting down.
The difference partly comes down to arithmetic: The U.S. health care system, which prioritizes free markets, provides more hospital beds per capita than the government-dominated Canadian system does.
“I’m not advocating for that American market-driven system,” said Bob Bell, a physician who ran Ontario’s health bureaucracy from 2014 to 2018 and oversaw Toronto’s University Health Network before that. “But I am saying that in Canada, we have restricted hospital capacity excessively.”
The consequences of that are being felt throughout the economy. In Ontario, restaurants, concert halls and gyms are closed while Quebec has a 10 p.m. curfew and banned in-person church services. British Columbia has suspended indoor weddings and funeral receptions.
The limits on hospital capacity include intensive care units. The U.S. has one staffed ICU bed per 4,100 people, based on data from thousands of hospitals reporting to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. Ontario has one ICU bed for about every 6,000 residents, based on provincial government figures and the latest population estimates.
Of course, hospital capacity is only one way to measure the success of a health system. Overall, Canadians have better access to health care, live longer than Americans and rarely go bankrupt because of medical bills. Canada’s mortality rate from Covid-19 is a third of the U.S. rate, a reflection of Canada’s more widespread use of health restrictions and its collectivist approach to health care.
Still, the pandemic has exposed one trade-off that Canada makes with its universal system: Its hospitals are less capable of handling a surge of patients.
The situation is especially stark in Ontario. Nationally, Canada has less hospital capacity than the U.S. has, as a proportion of the population. But even among Canadian provinces, Ontario fares the worst. It had one intensive-care or acute-care bed for every 800 residents as of April 2019, the latest period for which data is available, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. During the same period, the average ratio in the rest of Canada was about one bed for every 570 residents. (The state of New York has about one inpatient hospital bed per 420 residents.)
That leaves the province’s health care system in a precarious position whenever a new wave of Covid-19 arrives.
“The math isn’t on our side,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Monday as he announced new school and business closures this week to alleviate pressure on the province’s hospitals. The province has nearly 2,300 people hospitalized with Covid-19.
Ow. My brain.
The article is “lockdowns are bad actually because one could simply go to the ICU ward when sick with Covid-19 “
The writer is also doing some wild averaging to get to their averages numbers.
Also if Covid-19 causes people to need hospital care at a rate higher than 1/4,100 then we are fucked.
Oh also people still get sick with other things and need other health care too. Cancer hasn’t gone poof, strokes happen still.
America, if it’s ICU beds and hospital staff numbers are based on the market, (assuming free market is good like the writer does) has the number of beds to handle NON-PANDEMIC health issues and actually can’t handle everything.
Therefore opening for business, even if everyone who goes to the icu recovers WILL end up killing people because there is no room.
Locking down prevents spread, prevents deaths.
deleted by creator
When too many people get the virus and hospitals overload, it will start to ebb or more doctors will appear out of thin air, that's just supply and demand sweaty
The actual space and beds pop in and out of existence as needed in america
deleted by creator
I would desperately love someone to just write a book that contains a thorough account of all the hard-dystopia shit that has happened in the last two years. Like, I remember that, but it's hard to talk to libs who flit from disaster to disaster with whiggish blitheness and I'd like to just put a book in their pig hands and go all Red Dragon "DO YOU SEE?!"
We are under constant shock doctrine tactics.
Including having professional “normalization “ from posters at think-tanks. The lines of what is normal and okay are constantly being redrawn so that it’s so hard for people at large to put their collective foot down on something to say “no” about.
Because they will never let us have another Black Lives Matter moment, where the pattern of violence and abuse was extremely plain. The patterns will attempt to be hidden to make it harder for people see, it’s part of why everything is an isolated incident.