It may not be universal, but it certainly appears to be the case that many hospitals are being pushed over the limit due to covid patients.
Part of the issue, though, appears to be the fact that hospital admins are unwilling to raise salaries on essential employees like nurses.
Note: last April (2020), they said it had exploded due to COVID-19.
Both have very high hospitalization rates. Both also have very high vaccination rates.
In the worst case, it may just been that the vaccine effectiveness wanes over time.
Florida has the second-oldest population in the U.S., but it's death rate per 100,000 is average among the states. NYC and NJ are two states with the highest death rate per 100,000.
Positive covid tests require a hell of a lot more hospital overhead to deal with, even if they don’t have symptoms and are in for something else. It could very well be the case that this is a self made problem. We very well could be artificially overloading hospitals because we dictate that every positive test, regardless of symptoms, invokes massive overhead.
And again, every article I read never clarifies this. In fact many conflate “people with covid but there for something else” and “people sick with covid”.
I am fully inclined to believe that this hospital shortage is a self inflicted problem. If this was literally a hospital full of people choking on their own ooze, the media would be all over it like moths to a flame.
The stories on the reddits I suggested are all pretty much the same. Patient comes in struggling to breath, tests positive for covid, ends up with blood clots or pneumonia which pushes them into the ICU.
Here's just one of many stories of burnout [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/p9ps06/the_burn_ou...
> So, the anecdotal evidence would be...
I'm not trying to represent it as anything other than that.