"We have a health emergency" more people died yesterday on our roads, than have from this virus since the start of the year.
It is not an emergency, it is scare mongering that will cost everyone in our society than it should.
The issue is the rate of increase not how many are dead thus far.
Hospitals simply don't have the capacity to cope with the infection rate being more than a few % of the population at a time. Exceed that limit and then the death rate spikes from all sorts of other things as well - heart attack, stroke, car accident all become far more likely to kill you when you can't be admitted to hospital after having one because it's already full.
About now is the time "efficiency experts" disappear from the health system real quick, never to be seen again, and everyone starts realising that higher taxes to fund spare capacity in hospitals would have been a better idea after all.
Do all the elective surgery as a matter of course with the hospitals running at 80% of capacity. So you've got empty wards, you've got spare ambulances, you've got doctors working only standard hours and so on. Then when something like this happens we cancel all the elective stuff, run the hospitals up to 100% capacity, have the staff working overtime and so on.
Business efficiency gurus will say we can't afford that. In doing so they are saying that the situation we have now is cheaper and not too much of a problem really. Suffice to say I disagree.
Efficiency is brilliant up to a point, it's the very thing that makes our current way of life possible so it's by no means bad, but go beyond that optimum point and it ends with a meltdown. Everything from engines to warehouses do that, there's a point beyond which further efficiency comes at the price of reliability and if you accept that, if you want to have that efficiency, then you have to accept the occasional spectacular blowup as part of the cost.
The warning signs have been there for years but were ignored. Every state has a waiting list for surgery and that's a huge alarm bell because it means hospitals aren't being run with spare capacity. That being so, it was inevitable that we'd face something like this sooner or later.
It's the same in most countries of course but if you look at those who've contained it, well the key thing is they had the resources to throw at it. That's the bit most countries have failed at and that increases the economic cost hugely since it greatly ups the required disruption to everything else.