> Some of these places have like 400 ICU beds in a region of 17 million people.
That is, of course, far too few (Where is that? I've never heard of a ratio _that_ low for a developed country). But unfortunately, the time to fix it was about five years before it became a major crisis.
> You absolutely could 10x that or even 50x that given the fact you have asked hundreds of millions of people to put their lives on hold.
With what staff?
> What amazes me is somehow we managed to do exactly this back in march of 2020 with hospital ships and field hospitals.
As far as I can see, those were envisaged as a solution to a regional problem; if covid was only a big problem in a few regions, then this could work via redeployment of staff, drawing on limited reserves of staff (military, bringing people back from retirement, and so on). In practice, very few countries managed to maintain covid as a regional problem, so temporary hospitals became less interesting because _you can't staff them_.
