Paul Reid would tell you himself in fairness that he’s making it up as he goes along.
My understanding is we don’t have a fixed ICU capacity. It’s turned up and down as the need arises, no?
Be great to see who they drag up on the carry on side of the house.
Zero COVID mean pencil neck T Ryan anyway.
He probably is. I’d speculate that a lot of soft support for Level 5 is based on the premise there are 64 ICU beds with 32 in use and if an additional 50 people needed ICU then some of them would be dying in corridors.
I thought we had 282 ICU beds - fairly sure that was confirmed recently anyway by Varadker vs Doherty in leaders questions.
Granted most of them are taken up with cancer and all the rest etc , but still given the fact that just 95 out of 1800+ deaths have occured in ICU , It seemed a bit odd to me,
I think @Julio_Geordio point is well made though in relation to people who have come out of ICU etc.
So far that surge isnt there though which is good.
This is interesting
While the COVID-19 pandemic has strained global ICU capacity, we must also recognize that global pandemics are uncommon, and ICU clinicians must continue to act as stewards to intensive care—one of the most lifesaving, yet expensive treatments in medicine. This tension—saving lives at great expense—underscores the need to carefully consider the ideal number of beds within an ICU. The decision to reduce the number of beds within an intensive care unit (ICU) can have major implications for patients, clinicians, and hospitals. Therefore, this decision is ideally made from a societal perspective (i.e., maximizing benefits and minimizing harms for an entire health care system).
The focus on ICU care can, at times, misallocate valuable health care resources. In health care systems with relatively few ICU beds per hospital, expanding ICU care may misallocate spending that could be more useful in other areas of health care. In systems with more ICU beds, reducing the number of ICU beds may improve efficiency. Thus, reasons to limit the number of ICU beds differ by the underlying resources available to a health care system and are supported by two key lessons from personal finance.
That’s also only the public system
“We also still have 109 critical care beds, that we can use immediately and we have a surge plan, for critical care, within the public system alone, that would see us go up to 800 [beds].”
It’s all a bit of a game with this.
There’s loads of beds. Is there the staffing…well
We hired very few from the HSE’s big call out. There are a couple of hundred nurses and a couple of hundred doctors waiting to be hired apparently.
Did we do crash courses on ICU nursing for 6 months as part of tooling up?
We had enough nurses to staff 500 ICU beds at the peak so you have to wonder…
The truth I think is there are a few vested interests at play. The HSE and Reid are always up against it in the winter and are worried about flu season and also realistically would prefer hospitals to be emptier. We have to accept that there is a challenge in keeping regular hospital services along with Covid, but there is also one with flu season every year.
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We also know that we don’t need as many ventilators for this as we thought (I believe the HSE have 1,000 in boxes read to go if needed). The reduction in ventilators would you assume remove one of the main resourcing pulls.
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You are correct, I was referring to how the information is presented. There are 30 in ICU with Covid and 30 free. Where the true info is there are 30 in ICU with Covid, 200 with other procedures, many of which could be rescheduled, and 30 minimum free with another few hundred that can be taken from the private sector if the situation escalates.
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Which does suggest a full lockdown now is unnecessary and may even be counter productive.
The case numbers on their own really are no reason for the levels of fear to be upped as we stand.
The 40 stooges in Nphet of course want no one to ever die again at all cost, when in reality they should be adhering to WHO advise.
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You can meet your parents, but only if you have a pint outside the pub with them
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McDowell’s article raises an interesting theory. Previously I’d considered that there were two motivating factors driving our response, either the Government was afraid of being branded murderers by the Twitter mob and hiding behind NPHET, or that the health service was in such rag order any escalation would overwhelm the system and this lead to government caution. While there’s probably an element of truth to both, McDowell highlights that NPHET are inextricably linked to the operation, resource allocation and practices of the HSE and are motivated to cover their own ass if it’s shown up as not fit for purpose, hence the zero Covid noise, the system can’t fail if it’s not put to the test
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The ban on all household visits is a very draconian measure.
At least you’ve finally accepted that GAA must be a global sport, given the surges all over Europe
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More draconian than any other measure basically but it’s in level three now and I can still have a pint outside a pub, eat outside a restaurant, go to penny’s, to the cinema etc etc. Talk about nonsense.
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If level 3’s bad, that McDonkey cunt was pushing a level 6 to 10 last week.
Can only imagine what that would entail…ffs.