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I hope this is the focus of government planning in this country
I rather suspect that their focus will be to incrementally increase the level of interventions each day until the moment it drops out of the news cycle.
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Rapidly increasing ITU capacity is tricky - the main issue is having enough ITU-trained nursing staff to properly look after someone on a ventilator as it’s a highly specialised job. It’s complicated by the fact that COVID is aerosol generating and you therefore can’t use less invasive (and therefore less resource intensive) forms of ventilation such as BIPAP which would otherwise work well in a lot of the covid cases.
Physical capacity isn’t so hard - there are plans to incrementally cancel non-urgent surgery and use the operating theatres and anaesthetic machines in them as demand requires.
There’s a good article here from an ITU consultant talking through what’s going on behind the scenes, and why it’s such a challenge - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/03/icu-doctor-nhs-coronavirus-pandemic-hospitals
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christianSpaceman
kimchi
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The trigger for the quarantines in Hubei and Northern Italy appears to essentially have been the same - i.e. the local health care system being heavily stressed by rapid increase in severe cases.
The fundamental government challenge with covid 19 is surely to figure out how to rapidly increase ICU capacity. I hope this is the focus of government planning in this country.
I'm curious to know what the options are. Is it feasible to start designating certain hospitals only for treatment of covid?