Can anyone make sense of this slide? What is California doing it with its IC U and hospital capacity?
The allegation is that California is deliberately lowering ICU capacity to justify purple plus lockdowns. I'm more wondering what is going on inside the hospitals. On the one hand, it's very clear the hospitals are stressed, there are horror stories of people dying, people who under other circumstances might be hospitalized to be safe are being sent home, there's been some scrubbing of elective procedures, and of ambulances being diverted to other hospitals. On the other hand, there hasn't been a whole lot of reporting of people being turned away from medical care, declarations that hospitals have collapsed, actual rationing of care where some people are just written off to die (despite LA now being either at or past peak and supposedly ICU capacity at 0%), and the nurses still have time to do tik tok.
My family is largely medical (except for us lawyer siblings) but none of them are active ER. But from what I can gather the hospitals are very stressed but no where near collapse. It's like a very very bad flu season. Hospitals are typically stressed in such times January-March though not usually this much except when a once in a decade flu even comes along. Anyone any first hand insight for what's actually going on? My impression is that it is bad, but there's also a whole lot of exaggeration going on.