In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences was worried hospitals weren’t ready for a crisis. At the time, the subject seemed urgent. It was just after the spring of H1N1 influenza, and experts expected the virus to return again in fall. The organization published a report that year, and several others over the years to follow. The key takeaway: Good crisis care makes decisions based on the health of the community, not just the health of the individual. The U.S. health care system was not used to that kind of thinking. Making that shift would be difficult, but possible — provided there were clear guidelines in place, shared by hospitals across the country, and visible to the public.
But more than a decade later, despite a lot of progress, experts I spoke to said there are still no nationwide crisis regulations or standards in place. State and local plans vary in scope and quality. That means there are no uniform guidelines that decide who gets access to a scarce resource — like a test for novel coronavirus — and who doesn’t. There’s no consistent appeals process for those rejected. And we still have a health care system where nearly every resource, from basics like beds to life-saving tools like ventilators, could very quickly become scarce…
The statistics of COVID-19 don’t necessarily sound horrific. You can go look at charts that clearly show that the majority of infections are mild, the bulk of people recover, and people 60 and over are most at risk. Unfortunately, while that information is accurate, it’s also misleading. That’s because the real risk of COVID-19 isn’t about what it does to one person, experts told me, it’s about the community. It’s not about “Will I die?” it’s about “How much will this overwhelm our health care infrastructure?
And COVID-19 could certainly do that….
Read full story on Jake Silver’s Five Thirty Eight at https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/coronavirus-may-make-millions-of-americans-sick-but-we-only-have-about-100000-ventilators/?cid=taboola_rcc_r