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Comment by greedo | Hacker News Reader

The first assumes that increasing vents, ECMOs, and hospital beds is all that's needed. You'd still need trained staff to man them. Staff that is extremely vulnerable to this disease. Also, if you don't shut things down, you'll overwhelm the system, even if you were able to double the number of beds...

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Do those things cost trillions of dollars? I don't think so. Each country could probably commit a couple hundred million to this and be better off than a complete shutdown.

In a world with perfect planning, yes it would have made more sense for us to expand our healthcare so that we could withstand something like this. But we didn't. We made our bed, and we have to use what we have in hand.

We can't create enough bed space, vents, ECMOs, in the next 6 months. We can't train enough doctors, nurses, etc in 6 months. So we play the hand we're dealt, and choose a mitigation strategy that doesn't result in 70M worldwide fatalities (6M in the US).

Why 6 months? How much money does it take to do it in 1 month? Is that amount of money less than trillions of dollars?

It's not a cost issue. It's supply & capacity issue. You cannot create instant supply immediately, even with a trillion dollars.

Lower requirements by having virus treatment staff with rapid specialized training

It usually takes a doctor between 7-10 years to get licensed. Sure you can change requirements, but do you want someone just out of med school working in ICU without adequate supervision, making complex assessments and treatments? The pipeline for both nurses and doctors is just severely constrained.

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