But another problem is you simply can't stockpile all the resources needed for EVERY scenario. For example, NY governor was roasted for not having ventilators stockpiled. At $10k ea, why in the hell would you have a 10 Million? dollars (1000 ventilators) in equipment just sitting there?
Also, As far as hospital resources, you have to have the staff available to do that. If you called up all the nurses in the NG, it would pull those nurses away from their regular nursing jobs. There would be no net gain.
Covid is merely a footnote for those relatively healthy people under 50. If you have comorbidities, and are over 50, this could get bad.
This is a fair point. We have a field hospital set up in Milwaukee. I'm not sure who is staffing it, but I assume it is military providers. So far, I don't think we are going to need it, although our bed situation is so bad right now that maybe we should.
We may have a strategic stockpile of ventilators to some degree. Honestly, given that many infectious diseases behave like COVID in that they surge and recede, we should be able to move equipment better in such a scenario to support surge sites.
I would change the verb merely to mostly. About a quarter of our current inpatients are under 50. But, as I said earlier, colon cancer is rare before 50, but it happens and is tragic. There are some seemingly inexplicable and tragic deaths with COVID, including doctors and nurses in their 20s, but because those cases get so much press, the fact these cases are huge outliers sometimes gets lost and makes people at low risk become irrationally afraid.
When this first started and I was looking at what was happening in Italy, I'll admit I wrote "in the event of my death" letters to my kids. Now that we are armed with more data, I'm not overly worried. Obviously, my number could get called, but it could in any other number of ways as well. We had a nurse die from pancreatic cancer in her early 30's, for example.
Now for my parent who are in their early 70s, they need to be overly careful.
So far, with masking and distancing, we've generally been able to handle the surges. That's what I hope people realize. With common sense, distancing, and mask wearing we can probably keep most educational services open and maximize economic output and hopefully keep more painful choices, like lockdowns, off the table.