The economy was shut down so that the coronavirus wouldn’t overrun hospital resource capacity. If we overran capacity, we would end up like Italy, with a lot more people dying because they couldn’t get treatment. In California, we hit peak hospital resource use on April 14. In California, we used 2,753 beds of the 26,654 available. We used 617 ICU beds of the 1,993 available. Every ICU bed has a ventilator. Roughly 80 percent of the deaths were 65 and older. Nineteen percent were 50 to 65 and roughly one percent were less than 50. Of those that died, almost all had underlying medical conditions. In California, we came nowhere close to overwhelming hospital resource capacity. The reason for the statewide shutdown no longer exists. We should focus on isolating or quarantining the high risk individuals and begin to reopen the fifth-largest economy in the world.
Lawrence Weisdorn