| Comment | A big issue is that another spike in COVID will fill up all the ICU beds, so if you fall off a ladder and bang your head, have a heart attack, need emergency surgery... the staff and equipment aren’t available so you’ll just die unless they take folk off the ventilators so they can die and you take their place.
We had 173 ICU beds in Scotland and that can be quadrupled to 700 (https://www.gov.scot/news/intensive-care-units-show-resilience-during-covid-19/). There just isn’t capacity to care for thousands of sick people no matter what resources you throw at the problem.
Yes, it’s shite, we’re all miserable, screening and access to healthcare is impacted so people will present with more advanced stages of disease and more likely to die from them, there’s a mental health crisis, and people in the lower socioeconomic areas are suffering disproportionately as usual. Folk will lose their jobs and businesses.
But the alternative is COVID spreads through the population leading to huge number of deaths and health conditions. The Spanish (1918) flu took two years to burn itself out. This isn’t unprecedented.
TLDR; it’s shite but we don’t have any other option. |
|---|