Canadians love to compare out health care system to the Americans. Well, here's a comparison they might not like.
COVID-19 has put about 24 people per 100,000 Albertans in hospital over the past week or so.
Some time in the next week or so Alberta may have to go to ICU triage protocols. Doctors may have to start following pre-set rules that determine whether someone with very severe COVID or someone injured in a serious motor vehicle accident can get an ICU bed. Already this week, Dr. Verna Yu, the CEO of Alberta’s health system, declared that the only reason the system has not collapsed yet is that enough ICU beds are being freed up by patients who are dying every day.
Twenty-four people per 100,000 in hospital would put Alberta in the bottom half of U.S. states by COVID hospitalization rate. The New York Times tracks this information by state, and as of Tuesday Montana was at 41 per 100,000, Alabama at 39, Texas at 40, Arizona at 25, and Colorado at 18. None of them are anywhere near a hospital crisis.
In the past six weeks or so, hospitals in some U.S. states have approached 70 to 80 per cent capacity, but they can handle these numbers. Pre-pandemic data from 2018 showed that all U.S. states except Hawaii and Vermont had an ICU capacity of 18 per 100,000 or better — that’s not hospital capacity, that is ICU capacity and those numbers have likely increased since COVID. Alberta’s expanded ICU capacity is 370 beds, or about eight per 100,000.
The U.S. system, for all its flaws and unfairness, creates capacity we have never seen in Canada. The poorest U.S. states have more ICU beds per capita than any province in Canada.https://nationalpost.com/opinion/vitor-marciano-albertas-fourth-wave-exposes-how-little-capacity-canadas-hospitals-actually-haveCanada has 2.52 hospital beds per 100,000 people. Greece, which is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy, has over 4. France has 6, Germany 8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_beds
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