Vaccines drastically reduce hospitalisation. That frees up medical resources for everyone, especially those who aren't vaccinated and those that need care.
We are already seeing medical procedures get postponed and hospital staff being pushed at the breaking point. The help to your community of being vaccinated is simply huge.
Vaccinated people are more prone to be asymptomatic when infected, which means they are less likely to notice the infection, thus less likely to isolate and go into quarantine.
This is made even worse by the fact how a whole bunch of countries have stopped testing vaccinated people, they are just assumed healthy and not contagious by default.
Now throw in vaccinated people demanding to be exempt from pandemic measures, like not having to wear masks anymore and being allowed into crowded venues, and vaccinated people have the biggest potential to become the new super spreaders.
By now that’s even become the main argument for vaccinations: Less hospitalizations due to less severe symptoms. While all the talk about “herd immunity”, the original most pushed reason for mass vaccinations, has turned out to be not realistic.
And in vaccinated people even that infectious phase is lower.
Do you know of a hospital system that’s overloaded in the way you are worried about? I’ve seen plenty of bloggers who talk about this, but they never seem to actually link to the data backing up their stories.
First of all, that's not total ICU utilization, which is the metric that should interests you.
Illinois, the state you cherry-picked, has only 508 ICU beds remaining out of 3127. That's one doubling away from disaster.
Here's an example of people dying because they couldn't find an ICU bed : https://meaww.com/ray-demonia-cardiac-failure-dies-icu-beds-...
Right now the US is at the cusp of disaster with 78% nationwide ICU utilization. As we've seen some states are at functionally 100% utilization and turning away patients.
Hospitals are businesses. They don’t just create tons of empty ICU beds and then never use them.
If you are getting your information from for profit blogs and magazines then I’d suggest doing a quick analysis on their motivations. Do you think they have more motivation to get you to click on their products, or more motivation to give you valid (but boring) information?
Most of the states (all? I’ve looked at a lot of them) have some for of data dashboard that will give you a better overview of this. I’d highly suggest checking those instead of twitter/blogs/etc. It might not give the data that you are hoping for, but that’s kindof the behavior that is the problem (seeking out blogs and magazines that confirm your priors)
78% may have been the past utilization, however nowadays use of the ICU removing COVID patients is around 60%. So clearly there has been some level of denial of care. And even then we are close to the breaking point.
I think you're not making the point you think you're making with that data. 78% utilization is a lot when a very significant part of that is from an infectious disease known to spiral out of control easily.
From a 2014 analysis:
>Issues pertaining to the utility, interpretation, and reporting of ICU occupancy measures were identified and there were indications that optimal ICU occupancy rates were around 70-75%
https://healthandwelfare.idaho.gov/news/idaho-activates-cris...
And is absolutely overwhelmed. It seems incredibly disingenuous to only consider some random state that's doing well and ignore those doing poorly.
https://rationalground.com/hospital-and-icu-capacity-dashboa...
Also, if you go back in look for headlines of hospitals being overwhelmed, you will see they exist for the flu for almost every year as well.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2018/01/24/Hospitals-overwhe...
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/idaho.division.of.pub...
And Idaho is absolutely overwhelmed. In past flu seasons they have not moved to crisis standards of care, I don't even see Idaho in the article you linked so I'm not sure what relevance it has here. Are you claiming the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare is unaware of their own ICU utilization status?
Based on the numbers and your original post, it doesn't seem to be a statewide issue. It is a localized issue of what seems an area covered by 10 hospitals.
The relevance is that hospitals having issues with capacity is not beyond the realm of normal.
You seem caught up in a narrative that this is not real, I urge you to consider the facts on the ground rather than fit things to your political views.
Thanks for yours and your input.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-alber...
During Canadas third wave hospitals were overwhelmed the point that people were dying while waiting for care.
In this case 6 patients died while waiting for cardiac surgery because the ICUs were overwhelmed dealing with Covid patients.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/covid-19-stay-home-o...