by stefantalpalaru
«Dr. Melisa Lai-Becker, the medical director for the emergency department at Cambridge Health Alliance’s Everett Hospital, spent much of Monday afternoon urgently calling hospitals all over the state.
“I was searching for an ICU [intensive care unit] bed for one of our patients, and every single facility is full,” she said. “They are at full capacity. They have no ICU beds left.”
She even started looking up hospitals she could call in neighboring states, but they’re in the same predicament.»
«More than 2,300 people in the state were hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Monday.»
Quite alarming, right? And there’s a figure of authority telling you all ICUs are “at full capacity”. Why would you question that?
In April 2020, Massachusetts had 1,500 “baseline” and 1,200 “surge” ICU beds: www.mass.gov/doc/command-center-hospital-capacity-charts/download
On January 4th, the day that article was published, there were 427 Covid patients in ICU, in the whole state: i.imgur.com/ntgT6C5.png
Including non-Covid patients, the state had 1,082 occupied ICU beds out of a total of 1,256: i.imgur.com/1sSoMZC.png – an 86.1% occupancy level and they’re not even getting ready the rest of their “baseline” beds, because it makes no logistic sense to do so.
Their capacity is elastic and there’s plenty of room to grow, so anyone panicking about being no more beds in ICU has been gravely misinformed.
See: www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-response-reporting
And those 2,300 people “hospitalized with COVID-19”? Most of them in non-ICU beds, but not specifying that in the middle of a panic-inducing article about ICUs is a lie by omission.