Bender said:
L K said:
WAYNEINIONA said:
As long as the hospitals don't get swamped with new admissions I think they will just ride it out.
This is one of the things that is getting left out of the discussion too much. Shutting things down wasn't about preventing COVID cases. It was from preventing overrun ICUs. Having an uptick in cases if they are primarily mild isn't going to be the limiting factor on whether things get shut back down. Besides we are still on the early wave of seeing if opening things back up causes a problem. It's going to be next weekend and the week after that that will be a much better indicator of whether we are heading for another problem.
Are they not to some extent one and the same? To prevent ICU admissions wouldn't you also have to prevent cases in the first place?
I also don't see things backsliding into lockdown unless ICUs start to fill up but that doesn't seem like an elegant solution since ICU admissions and death are lagging indicators.
Not really. In the early stages of COVID the threshold for Intubation was set incredibly low. The hospital alliance I work with basically suggested if you went past 4 litres of oxygen by nasal prong, start thinking early intubation. For COPD/long term smokers/people with bad hearts, that's really a low threshold for even healthy individuals wiht a bad pneumonia. Now we are doing a lot more to prevent intubation with patients so that has made a big transition point for how quickly we need to access ICU beds for even sick COVID patients.
We also just don't have a bed crisis in the hospitals at this point in time. If we ended up with a massive influx of cases, we potentially would have to reconsider going back to more extreme precautions, but at this point in time we are dealing with 70+ percent of our cases coming from the GTA and those numbers are steadily in the 3-400 range a day. That just isn't the volume to justify keeping everything closed.
We have also increased our ventilator access so should things actually get worse we have more bed availability than we did at the onset of the COVID pandemic so we have more wiggle room to handle an influx of cases.
Categories of who is getting infected still play a big role as well. Our largest death populations have come from the nursing homes. Deaths have obviously happened in other populations but the elderly have been our biggest risk population. Expanding people back to work and out in the day to day while keeping restricted visiting in the homes isn't likely to cause the same problem as just outright opening everything up into a free for all.