You get headlines like that in many years, newspapers love "hospital at brink of collapse" stories. Look at the archives of the last 10 years and you'll find it's a common theme. There are several tricks that can be used to generate them, for example in most hospitals ICU is a flexible designation and ICU capacity can be increased or lowered. It's inefficient to have empty ICU beds, so those units are very often "full" but it doesn't mean much.

Look at places like Sweden (fewest ICU beds in the EU, not overloaded), or Switzerland (one of the best staffed systems, also not overloaded). There are problems when bad management makes problems, as in any enterprise, which newspapers love to find, and sometimes they invent problems that don't really exist (finding a doctor who will say they're tired/burnt out/need money is the easiest thing in the world).

That's why it's better to look at the stats and dig into the system level causes of load issues, as you would with any IT system.

As for avoided: no, none of the measures implemented have had any impact. You can find proof of this in many forms, but the simplest is to look at places like the UK. They just removed a whole boatload of restrictions in the form of "freedom day" and cases fell off a cliff. Experts were left baffled because they had all been predicting a huge surge, although people who were actually looking at the data weren't baffled at all: the fall was predictable given the shape of the same wave in other countries + the assumption that restrictions were having no effect.

> That's why it's better to look at the stats and dig into the system level causes of load issues, as you would with any IT system.

Since you're making an argument from statistics, it would be helpful to provide some numbers for your claims and their provenance.

Take a look at the Swiss hospital stats. Many countries don't provide hospitalization stats regularly, keep them secret, or corrupt them in various ways, for example in the UK there was a blowup just a few days ago because it turned out over half of all COVID hospitalizations appeared to be catching COVID in the hospital itself meaning those stats were giving an inflated impression of hospital load. These numbers were leaked despite their importance to understanding the severity of the epidemic. But the Swiss stats are open and public.

https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total

As you can see, it never got above ~80% utilization, even though Switzerland's second wave peaked many weeks before restrictions were re-imposed. The Swiss system is well funded, but it's not an alien planet. If they can do it any developed country can. Also remember that lots of places built emergency hospitals. They were invariably never used.

Or look at Swedish data.

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/4b4dd8c7e1...

Sweden started the pandemic with the lowest ICU capacity in the EU yet their age adjusted mortality only reached the same level as in 2012 - not even a "once in a decade" level problem.

https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...

> "over half of all COVID hospitalizations appeared to be catching COVID in the hospital itself"

That isn't factual.

Half of COVID hospitalizations were diagnosed with COVID after admission.

The shitty newspaper article then spread the impression that people were going into the hospital for a broken leg and contracting COVID and counted as COVID hospitalizations with exactly zero proof.

The alternative explanation is that people show up at the hospital with strokes and heart attacks and are tested and show COVID positive and probably really are COVID hospital admissions due to COVID-caused thrombosis Particularly since thrombosis affects more younger people who are now making up the majority of unvaccinated hospital admissions. 40 year olds who get the sniffles and think its just a cold, then throw a clot and get admitted or just die has been happening from the very start of this.

Not even going to waste my time on your WhatAboutTheSwissHospitalDataism, I have work to do and don't have hours to spend today to figure out why you're wrong.

People are tested before admission and then tested after admission. The figures are to do with the latter. People who turn up at hospital because they're dying of COVID don't get counted in the latter. Regardless, your alternative explanation is no more factually based than the obvious, simple explanation.

Regardless, I can see you already have your conclusion and will stick to it. So be it.