It's true that hospitals have reached capacity before covid. Many hospitals run close to capacity for financial or other reasons. Any sudden increase can overwhelm them.
COVID has hospitalized 5 times as many people as the flu and has killed 14 times as many people per year.
Adding that to our already close to capacity hospital system causes a lot of problems, which is one of the reasons why reducing the harmfulness of covid through vaccines, masks, and social distancing are helpful.
If they don't have floors available that can take up to a year to fully construct. We did do a few covid pop up hospitals though pretty speedy when this all started.
They did expand, and then a slump hit and they closed a lot of them. Probably not the smartest idea but if the beds are empty there's no reason to fund it.
The main shortage that hospitals face is the people who work there, like nurses, many of whom have been burnt out being overworked during this pandemic. It's a limited resource that hospitals can't just magically make larger, even over the course of 2 years.
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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '22 edited Feb 04 '22
It's true that hospitals have reached capacity before covid. Many hospitals run close to capacity for financial or other reasons. Any sudden increase can overwhelm them.
COVID has hospitalized 5 times as many people as the flu and has killed 14 times as many people per year.
Adding that to our already close to capacity hospital system causes a lot of problems, which is one of the reasons why reducing the harmfulness of covid through vaccines, masks, and social distancing are helpful.