Originally <a href='https://www.sportsbookreview.com/forum/showthread.php?p=29793342'>posted</a> on 10/16/2020:

I worked in the covid ICUs in April though June. This is not overblown. The healthcare system was on the brink in just about every way. Keep in mind this is a system that is designed to operate at capacity. I find it funny when people talk about ICU beds as if that is all that matters. The physical bed is the smallest piece of it. You need ICU doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists to staff those beds. We don't just materialize out of thin air. In a city that was not even hit hard, we converted 4 units to ICUs in the hospital I work at and a tremendous amount of effort was taken to make entire floors negative air pressure. All revenue generating surgical procedures were stopped and much of the staff was mobilized to the ICUs. It was chaos. I wasn't qualified to be doing things I was doing. The same goes for the resp therapists that normally work on the floor and who were thrown into this mess. Family members were making end of life decisions over the phone on a daily basis. I watched as an entire family was devastated. A sick teenage daughter at home trying to decide about the code status for her vented parents. Both grandparents were already dead.
There is this thing called exponential growth. Something like this can get out of control very very quickly. Ask Italy how ignoring the virus went for them. If we hadn't shut down and started distancing we would have been totally ******. We were nearly ****** anyway by our inept response and failure to test early. Shutdown was the only option. Otherwise the economy shuts down when bodies start accumulating in the streets.
And i'll say this too. Even with my antibodies, I'm not going back to the ICU. I volunteered, but this time around, if people decide to say penetrate it, then I will too. You all can live with the consequences. We had to use a floppy recycled N95 that wouldn't seal or hold it's shape for an entire shift because our manufacturing in addition to the middle class has been sold out to third world sweatshops for corporate margins. The craziest thing is, I actually ended up taking care of one of the principle authors of NAFTA when I was in that ICU.