@maxdancona,
Quote:...health care systems should be built with enough capacity to handle a pandemic or other emergency.
Well sure. Great idea. And let's make sure all our highways are built wide enough to handle any mass exodus when a natural disaster strikes. Let's build all our coastal housing stock on stilts for the expected rise in sea level when the ice caps and glaciers all melt.
Healthcare is expensive. Not only the equipment but also the cost of training and keeping well-educated experienced professionals. So you think we should expand all our medical facilities, including equipment and staff, to handle the sorts of waves of infection and sickness we have seen during this pandemic. But won't much of the expanded capacity be idle once the pandemic subsides? How much will it cost to pay the wages of all the unneeded nurses, orderlies, and specialists trained and hired solely to combat the pandemic? What will we have them do when the number of patients shrinks to normal levels?
I think triage is something we need to get our heads around given that we may very well see disasters and pandemics in the future which dwarf the problems we see now.
