I don't know where your 80% comes from - is it ventilators, not beds.
Hospitals can only ever run at 100% or less of bed capacity unless patients are left on trolleys. And for ICU I assume that beds are allocated initially on clinical need, and when push comes to shove on the basis of clinical priority.
This means that some patients who would normally qualify for an ICU bed will not get one. Hence very sensible contingency arrangement to transfer patients to adjacent hospitals!
Incidentally there is rarely spare capacity in public services except through planning errors. If so, budgets would be reduced and applied to another serice with greater needs. This is true for:
- NHS where needs are almost infinitely variable and managed through waiting lists, and
- education where aggregate school places matches aggregate pupils limiting real parental choice
If an NHS has several hundred Covid cases it will inevitably deny treatment to other lesser needs!
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