Here is what I don’t understand. On that site Pegger provided, it said there were over 13,000 cases active with only 60 in serious or critical. The rest were in good condition. If you are in good condition, don’t they just have you quarantine at home? How could they be out of rooms at this point?
Currently you are not out of rooms, so there's no immediate issue. Per the stats there are:
13,325 active cased composed of:
- 13,261 in mild condition - meaning they should self quarantine as they can still past the virus onto someone else
- 64 in serious condition - They will need a hospital bed in an area they can't transfer to another patient
297 closed cases which is comprised of:
- 189 deaths
- 108 recovered/discharged
The issue is not the 64 people occupying beds now, it's the 13,261 active cases along with an unknown number of people with mild symptoms who have not been diagnosed. The larger, mild case number will eventually make it's way to more serious cases.
Let's look at Italy currently. Just remember, Italy's population is around 1/10 of the US, so think of this in scale.
Currently Italy has 2,498 serious/critical cases and 30,692 in mild condition. If the US follows the same trajectory of Italy that would be roughly ~25K serious/critical cases and ~300K in mild condition. Here's the kicker, Italy is having more people be diagnosed as carriers (serious and mild) than they are healing people each day. Their numbers are getting worse every single day.
There's not only issues around beds. Some equipment, like ventilators are needed and cannot be shared. All the same, when you go past your health care capacity line bad things happen. The best way to avoid that is to be cautious and take as many precautions as possible to avoid any transmission.