"overcrowded" "at capacity" "only x beds left" etc is all kikery at its finest. Because any time they say shit like this, they are technically correct. But what they are literally saying and *how they know it will be interpreted* are two completely different things. It's how they get away with claiming to be honest while the people that disagree with them are nutjobs. A hospital can be "overcrowded" at any point that more than the anticipated amount of people show up. If there's a really bad wreck for instance, and they suddenly have to send 12 people to the ER, that is "overcrowded". A hospital can be "at capacity" because they don't have beds *immediately* available, or simply because they have some policy or regulation that says we only treat this many people at once. "X beds left" can be because they don't have staff for the beds due to a shift change, or somebody couldn't come in to work that day, or whatever. The point though is all these phrases are meant to evoke images of you going to a hospital and ending up dying on the curb outside because they just can't treat anybody else; of rooms triple or quadruple stacked with patients while even more are laying out in the hallways; that this virulent, deadly plague is so out of control that it is simply not possible to be contained. The fact of the matter is that hospitals have been operating exactly the same way they were before all of this shit. They triage people, keep the ones they absolutely have to, transfer the ones they can get away with, and send the rest of them home. They increase and decrease shifts based on immediate demand. If anything, it's the god damned clinics that are getting hammered more than anything, because you have a bunch of paranoid hypochondriacs coming in that absolutely have to get tested for COVID when they have nothing wrong with them.