I worked at the largest hospital in my area. We served 200 miles north, probably 300 miles east and west, and probably 300 miles south as the only major hospital.

I was surprised to learn that our absolute maximum capacity was 800 beds, and probably maxed out at 50 ICU beds.

Before working in a hospital I had no idea that hospital beds are a seriously limited resource. I never would have realized that the 100 occupied beds at my current hospital due to Covid patients is a big deal without that experience.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on May 18 2020 09:26am

If Cuomo was right, why did he reverse his decision? If Cuomo was right, why did the death toll among nursing home residents overtake all other groups combined? Cuomo's policy was so bad that he reversed it and made the new policy that if a nursing home resident had covid, they would not be ALLOWED back into the nursing home until they were over it. You do NOT introduce a virus that has a BRUTAL co-morbidity lethality rate into a nursing home. It's just stupid on the face of it. Took thousands dead for Cuomo to figure that out.

If there's not enough space in the hospital itself, an alternative solution is required. And eventually several were determined. But in the meantime, the shortsighted "send them home" caused more death than any other singular decision since the beginning of the pandemic.

And red states won't become nice "some day". I've living in multiple states. 4 in the last 10 years, as a matter of fact. 1 coastal Blue, 1 midwest blue, 1 midwest red, and 1 southwest red. I've also been through southern red quite often, AND I know the statistics. The red states have better roads, better economies, higher standards of living, fewer homeless, less crime, and an overall higher freedom index. The blue states have much MUCH higher taxes, worse roads, more crime, more homelessness, and with the exception of a very few, worse economies. And the economies in the blue states that are near the top of the list are based around cities that are drowning in homelessness, where you have the high earners making millions and billions, and the serfs that serve them unable to afford rent because building standards have been set impossibly high so nothing new can be built, and property values have skyrocketed due to the increased demand and lack of increased supply so the gov can get that massive increase in property tax.

I could literally go get a mortgage in Phoenix Arizona or any major city in Texas for a 3 bedroom 2 bath house and pay less per month than I'm paying right now in rent for this 620 square foot apartment. Yet this apartment is one of the absolute cheapest in this area, and I'm on the very outskirts, drive a mile and I'm out of the city entirely and into rural. I'm literally as far away from the city center as it's possible to be. There's no question I'm going back to a red state after the lockdown is lifted and I won't get fined simply for leaving. And it's not because I prefer any given politician. It's because I prefer politicians in general who won't tax me to death and prevent my ability to put a roof over my wife and I's heads. I'm sorry your time with the Chinese Virus has been so bad. But perhaps you should address the local policies of your lawmakers, and stop attempting to blame the federal government, who is driving up the debt faster than has ever been done in history in an attempt to help.

Bob has reached consideration for my list of posters who cant account for two factors at once.

And he seems determined to expedite the process

How's the covid death rate in Texas, Thor? Did their failure to lockdown cause them extreme issue, as you predicted? How about their lack of a state income tax? Are they broke as you predicted? Speaking of predictions, where's the 2 million American dead? Hell, where's the 300,000 American dead? Why are some areas listing people who died from a fall, or alcohol poisoning, or were in hospice prior to infection being counted among the covid dead? What's with the need to paint the china virus as worse than it is?

Why quarantine the healthy to protect the sick, rather than simply give the sick and at-risk the chance to self-isolate with compensation? Why attempt to push the world into a "Greater Depression" over what has turned out to have a lethality rate far FAR closer to the flu than anyone was led to believe?

It seems you're one of the people, all throughout this topic who's pushing a narrative that doesn't account for multiple factors.

The lowest estimate I've seen for lethality of Covid is 10x higher than the flu.

All those dead aren't materializing because pretty much everything shut down throughout most of the country. The numbers you are quoting are the "if everybody does everything as normal" numbers.

I don't think you're capable of reading critically. It seems you're just accepting whatever you want at first blush and then rejecting everything that contradicts it.

My friends are like "are you really wearing a mask out?"

Yea, I've had the flu like three times, so I'm wearing a mask for this.

I never took sick days before working at a hospital. Then the first year I worked in a hospital I took 6 sick days. Now I'm back to zero.

Was a weird time.

Even the Washington Post (you know, Bezos's far-right pro-trump publication?) is now printing articles about how testing is showing that likely infections are 10x what's already found. Current estimates range from an overall lethality rate, now that we have a better guesstimate of the denominator, in the overall population, of 0.05-0.5% depending on where you're talking about. The average seems to be around .2%, which would put it only slightly higher than the Flu. And that's keeping in mind that that's with the flu having yearly vaccines, and no vaccine at all for Covid. So not only is it "not as bad as the flu" it'll never reach any level comparable to say the 1918 flu pandemic. If you drill down even more, and say remove the "outlier" of those infected who're age 60+ and just assess the rest of the group, the lethality rate drops below 0.01% overall.

Further, the shutdown had very little or no real impact, in all likelihood. The very earliest shutdowns started at the beginning of march. The very first deaths where people were confirmed to have the virus in the US were at the beginning of February, and the first cases were in January. By mid February, there were cases in every state, in nearly all counties. At most, the realistic impact of the shutdown would be that the elderly who were forced to stay home were kept away from it, which may have saved a few, though how many is questionable. Of the younger age groups and healthy types that wouldn't suffer the co-morbidity risk, they simply wouldn't have died, and outside of a dry cough and maybe a loss of sense of smell for a few days, wouldn't even realize they had it.

At this point, I don't think you're capable of THINKING critically. You've blindly accepted "facts" that were nothing more than model-based estimates, and as actual facts come in, not just from the US, but all over the world, that shatter the faulty models of those estimates, you reject them out of hand because they don't fit your narrative.

Got a link to the WaPo article?


The most recent estimates I have heard for the lethality of Covid is 0.5-1%. For context, the seasonal flu is at around 0.1%, so 10x higher for Covid seems to be an upper bound rather than a lowest estimate.


Your argument is missing a critical point though: for the seasonal flu, we have a vaccine, and we have at least some sections of the population being less susceptible thanks to cross-immunities. Even with a 10 times higher lethality, the seasonal flu would still not be able to burn through the population nearly as quickly as Covid. Flu patients also typically dont require weeks of ventilation, which quickly overwhelms the healthcare system's capacities.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 18 2020 11:17am