Unused capacity

Terrigal sunrise today (courtesy Julie)

In Australia, the hospitalisations resulting from COVID-19 have been low.  I haven't been able to find statistics on the peak hospitalisations, but as of yesterday, across the whole of Australia, there were 160 COVID-19 cases being treated in hospital, of which 21 were in intensive care and 19 of those were on ventilators.

Currently, the estimated Australian capacity is about 2,500 available intensive care hospital beds all of which have a ventilator, so we are using only about 1% of our capacity.  If needed there are plans to nearly double the capacity.

Terrigal sunrise today (courtesy Julie)

There hasn't been much discussion in the media about what appears to be enormous spare capacity, but there must be a lot of empty hospital beds and under-utilised medical staff. Ultimately, I think there will be criticism of this oversupply by the "coronavirus is a hoax" crowd, but personally, I applaud the Australian authorities for getting so far in front of the curve.  Not only have we have avoided the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic thus far, but our medical system responded in good time to cope if it had been worse.

I feel a bit under-utilised myself at the moment, exacerbated by the additional time I have on my hands because I am not exercising.  I have finished a project to risk assess and redraw maps of all of my running club's regular routes which occupied a lot of the past month, and will now turn my attention to some other projects.  Some more of my daughter's PhD thesis chapters have arrived for proof-reading and there is some research to do for the latest iteration of our adventure plans for later this year.  I also have about ten years of monthly newsletters from my old running club to scan and make available on the web.  Even with all of the above, I'm not going to be very busy.