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Ireland typically runs a hospital bed occupancy level of 95%, and over 100% in the winter, with people lying in corridors. Our health system would be the quickest to be overrun in the EU, according to ECDC. That's relavant to policy decisions now.
The fact that Ireland lacks healthcare capacity is a policy and political choice about allocation of resources and taxation. https://twitter.com/CJAMcMahon/status/1312870742053343232?s=19
For context the average hospital bed occupancy rate in the OECD (fellow rich countries like Ireland) is 75% https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/0d67e02a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/0d67e02a-en#:~:text=Around%20half%20of%20OECD%20countries,copy%20the%20linklink%20copied!&text=Hospital%20beds%20include%20all%20beds,are%20immediately%20available%20for%20use.
The island cannot cope with a Bergamo situation. Northern Italy has a lot more hospital capacity than us. The policy choice available is to stop those people getting sick in the first place. https://twitter.com/peterdonaghy/status/1312873798711078912?s=19
We have had six months to learn so there are examples of different policy results. Asian countries in general have controlled the virus, and life goes on. In New York, Northern Italy, Madrid etc the numbers of dying people overwhelmed capacity so there were e.g. trucks of corpses
This is valid, and taking the 'max hospital capacity' metric as the key consideration in policy decisions on virus control is an ideological choice that may underrate longterm health impacts on survivors and overrate how much healthworkers can take https://twitter.com/abbeycollins202/status/1312880156156067846?s=19
Covid-19 is new so we don't yet know long-term health impacts, which are common in viruses and relevant to healthcare capacities.
E.g: 40% of Sars survivors assessed four years after infection had chronic fatigue and psychiatric problems like PTSD https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20008700/
E.g: 40% of Sars survivors assessed four years after infection had chronic fatigue and psychiatric problems like PTSD https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20008700/
This @trishgreenhalgh study of the emerging picture of the long-term health impact of Covid-19 found ~10% of survivors have "prolonged illness" including respiratory, cardiac, and neurological problems. Many patients were "young and fit" before infection https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3026
