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Comment by raydev | Hacker News Reader

The chart explicitly says "due to COVID-19". That is the number which has doubled in a matter of weeks, and today we reported another 27 due to COVID.

The total occupied due to COVID is now 412 compared to 150 just a few weeks ago, where that old number had been the average for months.

edit: and more directly to your point

> the number of ICU beds in use in Ontario has been trending down over the last 4 days

The total number of occupied ICU beds has gone down because the number of non-COVID patients decreased. Not sure how that is relevant to our discussion.

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It does say that, but I'm still skeptical. Shouldn't the total number of beds in use also be skyrocketing along with the Covid number?

Also:

""In ICU” numbers include people testing positive for COVID-19 and people who are in ICU for a COVID-19-related illness but have since tested negative."

It's not clear from the text that they are excluding people in the ICU with a positive test but are there for another reason.

> Shouldn't the total number of beds in use also be skyrocketing along with the Covid number?

Your expectations may be met soon enough. We're 800% higher in admits than we were 3 weeks ago. The total number of beds reducing up to 2 days ago looks more like a fluke than anything, a slight relief before the wave.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/01/11/are-you-for-or-w...

For what it's worth, I've been trying to find evidence of hospitals running out of ICU beds due to Omicron, but I'm not seeing it anywhere in North America, even in places that appear to have peaked. Staffing shortages due to quarantine policy seem to be a much bigger problem.

The vaccines really do seem to be working, and Ontario has a lot of vaccinated high risk folks compared to most US states.

More anecdotes that omicron infected patients are not a huge problem in highly vaccinated areas:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/COVID-San-Francisco-s...

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