Quote Originally Posted by Johnson85 View Post
I'm thinking that's not true, unless you are just talking about actual mattresses rather than capabilities.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551445/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmc.../#6bac4b167f86
Take Florida. 20 million people, 5 million are over 60. They have less than 5,000 ICU beds in the entire state, most of which are taken by the usual needs. Let's say they convert other rooms to ICU equavalents, and now have twice as many beds. Theyd still just have about 7,500 beds free. And they cant grow ventilators on trees either, that supply is pretty much fixed.

5,000,000 old people / 7,500 = 667 old people per bed. If even .15% of the old population need hospitalization at any given moment they're out of beds and certainly ventilators, and of course there would be many younger people in need of care too.

As far as medical staff and equipment, I dont know much about the US vs Italy. What I do know is we will be out of N95 masks almost immediately (some places already are) and the US has fewer Drs per capita than most. So we will have a very big Dr shortage.

The biggest problem seems to be ventilators. I'm sure here in a few weeks theyll figure out how to mass produce them, but for now the amount is basically fixed and pretty much everyone who needs hospitalization will need one