Shelter-In-Place Involuntary Quarantine, Day 7: Deep cleaned the kitchen today - floors, counter tops, stove, inside the microwave, etc. The task consumed a large percentage of my remaining paper towel supply, but once I got started there was no stopping and beside it was probably worth it. Also, I finally completed the 2020 Census form.
This covid-19 pandemic (the "Trump flu") is probably the biggest thing that’s happened in America since 9/11 and like 9/11, I don’t think things will ever be quite the same again. This will probably be the defining event of Millennial's young lives.
According to the best science I can find, right now Georgia has 10,500 hospital beds available. That number is expected to increase to about 18,000 by mid-May as new emergency space is brought on line and hospital tents, etc. are built.
How long this will last depends entirely on how well people behave and observe social distancing and shelter-in-place orders. Even with three months of social distancing, it is expected that hospitals will become overloaded by April 20 (the City of Atlanta is already reporting that its ICU capacity has been exceeded). Required hospitalizations will finally drop below capacity by the end of May, with peak crisis in mid-May when more than 92,000 required hospitalizations will far exceed the state’s capacity of about 18,000. The people in excess of 18,000 will have to be turned away and left to die, with a predicted total of 158,000 deaths.
If little or nothing is done, it will all be over sooner, mainly because so many will have died first. The models predict that with only limited action, it is expect that hospitals will exceed capacity by April 9 and that 214,000 people will die in Georgia alone. By early May, the number of survivors requiring hospitalization will finally drop below the hospital’s capacity and we'll be out of crisis mode, but at the cost of all those lives.
It’s grim. Despite Trump’s press briefings, there’s no sugar coating it. Of course, there would be almost no deaths if we enforced three months of strict Wuhan-style lockdown, but that’s not going to happen (“muh freedoms,” “the stock market”).
Stay home and stay safe, folks. Think about this: if you’re out and about and have a car accident, the hospitals are overloaded, overcrowded, under equipped, and understaffed. It’s almost like we all have no health insurance right now, because there’s no reliable health care system available. Pray that you don't have a stroke or a heart attack.
By the way, if you want to check out the old hard data yourself, my source is Coronavirus Act Now. For what it's worth, they recommend that to prevent hospital overload, Georgia must implement state-wide shelter-in-place measures between April 6th and April 11th at the latest. The sooner we act and the closer we adhere to the measures, the more lives we save.
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