Comments by "gerhard7" (@gerhard7323) on "The tyranny of the tech monopolies" video.

Hospitals the world over only have a certain amount of ICU beds available by choice. Some more, some less not least because, not to put too fine a point on it, they are an extremely expensive service to maintain as they require highly trained staff to man them. It is as much a political choice as it is a medical and economic one. It sounds brutal, but it all boils down to risk and cost benefit ratios. The same reason we didn't have piles upon piles of PPE sitting and decaying in a warehouse somewhere doing nothing at huge cost waiting for an occasion that may or may not have happened in our lifetimes. In normal times there are 'just' enough ICU beds that they can usually cope with what is usually thrown at them on a daily basis, but just occasionally they can't and this often makes the headlines provoking the 'is this what our society is coming to' type handwringing we've long become used to. Covid is an extremely unusual event. A real outlier in terms of the deleterious effect it is having on a very specific, limited by design and choice capacity uniquely placed to deal with it. The question is what happens in a post covid world with immediately decimated economies where such priorities will become even more difficult? Do we now expect our hospitals in future to have hundreds upon hundreds of empty ICU beds with lots of highly expensive trained staff milling about doing nothing on the off chance of another pandemic? For that, essentially, seems to be what a good many are now agitating for.
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