Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the insight. I'm curious; is the problem staffing, "beds" (which I assume means actual physical beds, or is this a term of art?), or a combination? Also curious how one squares the resource constraint issue with the exceptional nature of the events of the past couple years. What I mean is, did anyone think it made sense to massively increase capacity before the pandemic began? I'm not in health care so I d…
It's staffing. See my other comment. Germany lost > 4000 ICU beds during the past year.
I’m comparing the numbers from the DIVI registry:
2020-12-02: https://edoc.rki.de/handle/176904/7522 2021-12-02: https://edoc.rki.de/handle/176904/9047
I’m getting 24,949 beds for today, 27,543 as the year ago number (in both cases including a couple thousand ICU beds for kids which were later split out in the more current DIVI reports since ICU beds for kids aren’t helpful for this pandemic).
That’s a difference of 2,594.
Also, as the DIVI themselves explain: “Consequently, several factors play a role in influencing the number of beds that can be operated. A deliberate reduction of beds during the pandemic cannot be assumed. The reduction in available beds can be explained by the various points mentioned above, among others, and is supported by other data collected. The decisive factor for the operability of a bed is the medical staff.”
This is under a FAQ entry where they list five different reasons for the reduction in capacity: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/faq/18af7107-e098-43e7-a9f...
Staff themselves being affected by COVID-19 and becoming unable to work is just one of them.
The others are changes in how much staff is allocated per patient (this was increased), hospitals being more precise in their reporting and only reporting beds that can actually be staffed, changes in the criteria for a bed to be actually countable and the high effort ICU therapy of COVID-19 patients requires.