It’s staff, not beds

Alex Psirides writes:

A bed is a piece of furniture, incapable of providing any form of care, never mind intensively. To do so it needs a specialist intensive care nurse standing next to it 24 hours a day. This requires five to six intensive care nurses per bed as, inconveniently, they also want to sleep, have families, and not live in a hospital.

Caring intensively also requires equipment, drugs, doctors, a large array of allied health professionals (physiotherapists, pharmacists, radiographers etc) cleaners and administration staff. It costs around NZ$1.5m (£750,000) a year to keep one intensive care bed open, with the availability of intensive care nurses being the rate-limiting step.

So what has happened?

But two years have passed since Covid began and we do not have a single additional operational ICU bed.

We are very lucky that Omicron is so much less severe than delta. Otherwise ICU capacity would have been swamped.