Florida's Running Out of ICU Beds

Here's a Newsweek article published yesterday, June 18, headlined “Multiple Florida Hospitals Run out of ICU Beds as Coronavirus Cases Spike.”

As Florida health officials report another record single-day increase in cases of the novel coronavirus, new data shows hospitals across the state have filled most or all available beds in their respective intensive care units.

Numerous Florida medical facilities reported dwindling ICU bed availability on Thursday, with several reporting no availability at all, according to the latest report published by Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA). Palm Beach County was among those statewide regions where the availability of beds was most scarce. An accompanying report from AHCA shows about 75 percent of available hospital beds statewide are currently occupied.

The AHCA's data showed two of Palm Beach County's 17 hospitals have already filled all ICU beds, while several other medical centers reported limited availability. One hospital in Miami-Dade County has also reached its ICU bed capacity as of Thursday, and the majority of hospitals have filled more than half of beds in intensive care units. Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties have reported two of Florida's most severe local virus outbreaks....

What's particularly frustrating is that when the quarantines and lockdowns (such as they were) began last March, they were never a case of “We'll do this for a little while, and the problem'll go away”; they were supposed to buy us time to arrange for testing, contact tracing and similar things to allow us to (cautiously) re-open in a safe manner, until such time as a vaccine is developed. But almost none of that has been done, and the OneSimpleTrick (TM) that could enable most people to resume most activities (with certain precautions) -- wearing a mask in public -- is being decried by Trumpster-types as America's greatest human-rights violation since those evil damnyankees forced the noble Confederates to give up their slaves.

Where the coronavirus is concerned, the only thing that's changed since March is a much higher number of people it's killed (currently at 121,269 dead in the US alone, according to Worldometers). Our immune systems remain the same, the virus remains the same, and there's still no vaccine for it.