> and the situation here is barely worse than places with prohibitive restrictions.
Are you sure about this?
I lived in a metro area in the middle of anti-COVID restriction land for a portion of the pandemic. Our hospitals were slammed during every surge, mostly with COVID cases from outlying counties.
Tiny rural hospitals didn't have case spikes, but really only because they functioned purely as funnels to the metro hospital systems. In one case, a county never had more than a single digit number of ICU admissions! Of course, the dashboard failed to mention that the sole hospital in that county only had a single digit number of ICU beds... guess where their overflow patients ended up?
At least in our case, if you looked at statistics on dashboards you got one story, but if you paid attention to the actual source of cases -- as opposed to which ICU the patient was sent to -- you got a very different story.
Are you sure about this?
I lived in a metro area in the middle of anti-COVID restriction land for a portion of the pandemic. Our hospitals were slammed during every surge, mostly with COVID cases from outlying counties.
Tiny rural hospitals didn't have case spikes, but really only because they functioned purely as funnels to the metro hospital systems. In one case, a county never had more than a single digit number of ICU admissions! Of course, the dashboard failed to mention that the sole hospital in that county only had a single digit number of ICU beds... guess where their overflow patients ended up?
At least in our case, if you looked at statistics on dashboards you got one story, but if you paid attention to the actual source of cases -- as opposed to which ICU the patient was sent to -- you got a very different story.