2 COVID Vaccines Approved, End to Pandemic in Sight??

[dfrecore]

Overall in the US, 8% of all hospitalizations are covid, and % of total hospital beds being utilized is 63%.  We also don't know what's normal for this time of year during a non-covid year, so it's really hard to say if 63% is high, low or average.  But it's certainly not "nearing the breaking point."

I have been going by the numbers from this website.  This shows only COVID hospitalizations.
https://covidtracking.com/data/national

They take whatever the numbers the states give them so rather it's 100% true or not is debatable.  It's the ICU beds that are getting critically low in a lot of states and counties.

I'm going by this website: https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-...mpact.html

And then each state has one as well.  My state is at ~75%  My Metro area is at 57% (we border another state).

FYI, the CDC numbers haven't been updated since mid-July (7/14/2020) according to the data on that site.

Dashboards last updated as of July 14, 2020.

Overall hospitalizations and ICU utilization for COVID is 100% in some places already and way higher than normal in hotspot areas (which includes most major city centers). If you normalize that across the country, it will be a lot lower since folks in the middle of nowhere are less likely to get infected so they have far fewer COVID patients (and fewer beds as well I'd assume). This is one of the cases where a statistical mean doesn't give an accurate picture of the population being modeled, even if the data were up-to-date.

I wonder what this even means though.  In my former home in San Diego county, our local hospital laid off a ton of people earlier this year due to not having ANY patients (Covid or otherwise).  So is it that hospitals are "overwhelmed" because they let a bunch of people go, and now need to get back up to speed and re-open more space?  That's certainly a possibility.

I also remember hospitals being "overwhelmed" to the point that they had medical ships in CA and NY, and mobile hospitals all over the place, and then didn't actually need ANY of them...

I am highly suspicious of this whole "overwhelmed" thing at this point, I doubt almost anything I hear these days.  I think the government is inept, and the media likes to hype things that aren't even true.