The mystery of the empty hospital beds

The rapidly built Nightingale hospital in London has 4,000 beds, almost all empty, yet London hospital cases with Covid-19 are declining. If coronavirus had hit the NHS anything like as bad as predicted, it would have been filled several times over

To prepare for the expected surge in Covid-19 cases, British hospitals discharged patients and emptied beds. Fortunately, the Covid-19 models were wrong: the ICU surge never happened. Not only are British hospitals not overwhelmed, they have some 37,500 empty beds, four times more than is normal for this time of year. The lockdown was imposed to prevent the British National Health Service being overwhelmed. This will not happen, thank God, but the lockdown continues indefinitely, at least until Boris is well enough to make a decision.

The temporary corona hospitals built near New York were largely empty a week ago. The federal medical facilities at the Javits Center and the USNS Comfort were filled with empty hospital beds and operating at about one-tenth capacity on Tuesday. 

Private hospitals in Pennsylvania lost money by saving beds for Corona virus patients who did not come, I am pleased to say. The hospitalisation rate in New York was overestimated by a factor of seven. A Covid-19 field hospital set up near Seattle in the USA was closed after three days without admitting any patients. The hospitals famously built at very short notice near Wuhan were mostly under-utilised or even empty and then dismantled after a short time. 

Many intensive care beds in Germany and Switzerland are empty.

A big field hospital that was set up near Stockholm remains closed due to lack of demand. The number of patients in intensive care units remains low so far in Sweden which does not have a lockdown. There have been 1400 deaths with Covid-19 in Sweden, 139 per million, but the numbers are rising. There were 67 deaths yesterday, the highest single-day death toll in Sweden so far.