Laissez faire capitalism subliminally imprisons how we interpret — COVID's allegedly close-to-full hospital capacity

© 2020 Peter Free

 

03 December 2020

 

 

Preliminary premise

 

Unexamined assumptions generally (eventually) bite our behinds.

 

 

Managing COVID-19 has involved a lot of plucked-from-air assumptions

 

Most of these have been generated by a generalized unwillingness to investigate SARS-CoV-2's actual, as opposed to its presumed epidemiology.

 

There is also an especially interesting and insidious example of this — which has to do with using a slyly wrong measure of the pandemic's seriousness.

 

This one is the shared American and British penchant for using hospital occupancy rates as a measure of COVID-19's horribleness. As well as for a justification for generating (a) yet more hysteria and (b) the additional economy and freedom-killing measures that go with this intentionally fueled fear.

 

 

Are breached hospital capacities . . .

 

. . . a reasonably chosen measure of pandemic seriousness?

 

Or is hospital capacity a subtly unrealistic and intentionally misleading choice of measure?

 

 

Consider laissez faire capitalism's love of limiting supply . . .

 

. . . so as to profit corporatism out the wazoo.

 

Hospitals generally (ideally) target 75 to 85 percent occupancy, depending upon the day of the week and the time of day. This limit exists, so that hospitals and clinics profit during lean and normal demand times.

 

Historically (from 1975 to 2015), capacity rates have tended to be lower, spanning roughly 63 to 73 percent for larger hospitals of 200 to 500 beds.

 

Obviously, any surge in medical demand is going to stress this lowly-set healthcare supply.

 

 

Who would purposely plan a society this way?

 

A national defense strategist, for instance, would not plan defense infrastructure under a "no-stresses-ever" presumption.

 

Yet, authorities and the Lamestream predominantly continue treating our intentionally restricted supply of healthcare capacity, as if this choice is not societally malevolent and directly relevant to the current COVID situation.

 

Furthermore, the economic decision to limit medical availability has consequences that trickle down to directly overburden medical staff, during any pandemic or equivalent's supply-limited times.

 

 

A telling example of this kind of mistuned thinking — California

 

Governor Newsom is now figuratively yelling about the possibility of imposing another stay-at-home order.

 

 

The fact that COVID transmission is most effective inside households seems to have escaped him.

 

 

Newsom's purported reason for renewing an economy and freedom-crushing lockdown is California's stressed hospital bed capacity.

 

Most everyone will accept Governor Newsom's excuse as a legitimate reason to consider imposing draconian pandemic-control measures.

 

But consider this:

 

 

A dearth of hospital beds has been a worldwide problem throughout the pandemic, but California, with a population of 40 million, has a particularly acute shortage.

 

The wealthiest state in the wealthiest country has 1.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people, a level that exceeds only two states, Washington and Oregon, according to 2018 data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. California has one-third the number of beds per capita as Poland.

 

Many hospitals in California have maintained lower numbers of beds in part to limit the length of patient stays and lower costs.

 

[A] shortage of nursing staff will make handling the surge of virus cases “extraordinarily difficult for us in California,” said Carmela Coyle, the head of the California Hospital Association, which represents 400 hospitals across the state.

 

“This pandemic is a story of shortage, whether it is shortages of personal protective equipment, shortages of testing supplies, shortages of the trained staff needed to deal with these patients,” Ms. Coyle said. “It’s what has made this pandemic unique and different from other disasters.”

 

© 2020 Thomas Fuller and Manny Fernandez, Surging Virus Exposes California’s Weak Spot: A Lack of Hospital Beds and Staff, New York Times (01 December 2020)

 

 

In more insightful words

 

Laissez faire capitalism's penchant for extracting profit from monopolized scarcity — and — Government's love affair with corporatist-sponsored bribe-taking, as well as its now long-demonstrated incompetence — have combined to produce conditions which exponentially exacerbate a completely predictable (meaning biology-normal) situation.

 

 

Regarding the United States' culturally bestowed . . .

 

. . . (and happily shared) stubborn resistance to learning anything, ever.

 

We all know that medical demand is cyclical and subject to escalation, during seasons, outbreaks, pandemics and the like.

 

See, for instance, William Briggs' sardonic take on this phenomenon and the West's characteristically hysterical reaction to it — his article taking the form of collected past news headlines:

 

 

William M. Briggs, Oh No! Hospitals Are Overwhelmed! Raging Surges Reported In…1957…2000…2003…2016…, Anti-Empire (22 November 2020)

 

 

In view of biological reality, why would anyone . . .

 

. . . other than a Corporatist or Robber Baron type, think that restricting our medical care supply to essentially its lowest (and correspondingly very profitable) level is a great societal idea?

 

 

The moral? — Something about asses and heads?

 

Ask why the United States still has no adequate supply of viral-protective medical and citizen gear.

 

And why do both Government and Lamestream pitch hysteria, as well as expensive and unproven fixes — rather than doing what is actually working, cheaply, across most of the rest of the world?

 

Examine propagandized assumptions.

 

We live in a society that cultivates Greed and Stupidity, so as to profit ruling elites.