The ICU isn’t just for sick COVID patients, it serves a wide patient population and due to the cost of running and staffing an ICU, it needs to be relatively full to justify staff, equipment, and other services. Similarly, airlines prefer their planes to fly with few empty seats, from a business perspective, since the fixed costs of both air travel and hospital care are huge. Hospitals are businesses, too. and need revenues to cover their costs.
The news articles discussing ICU beds don’t mention whether this shortage represents physical beds or the ability to staff these beds, an important distinction. If a 40-bed ICU only has staff to safely care for 20 patients, and has a census of 19, they are reported to be full, with only one available bed, ignoring the fact that half of beds that cannot be used due to insufficient staff.
This latter nuance is never reported, only that ICUs are bursting at the seams. Instead the news reports, “95 percent of ICU beds filled” without clarifying whether these are physical beds or staffed beds.
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The ICU isn’t just for sick COVID patients, it serves a wide patient population and due to the cost of running and staffing an ICU, it needs to be relatively full to justify staff, equipment, and other services. Similarly, airlines prefer their planes to fly with few empty seats, from a business perspective, since the fixed costs of both air travel and hospital care are huge. Hospitals are businesses, too. and need revenues to cover their costs.
>
The news articles discussing ICU beds don’t mention whether this shortage represents physical beds or the ability to staff these beds, an important distinction. If a 40-bed ICU only has staff to safely care for 20 patients, and has a census of 19, they are reported to be full, with only one available bed, ignoring the fact that half of beds that cannot be used due to insufficient staff.
>
This latter nuance is never reported, only that ICUs are bursting at the seams. Instead the news reports, “95 percent of ICU beds filled” without clarifying whether these are physical beds or staffed beds.
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