If you go to a movie theater, you will see somewhere on the wall a sign saying
something along the lines of "Max capacity 400 persons by order of the fire marshal".
What that sign means is that a competent professional has evaluated the space,
and determined the maximum number of people who can safely occupy that room.
The movie theater doesn't get to sell more tickets, and pack more people into that space
just because a popular movie came out that everyone wants to see on the first day,
since they would be shut down and lose their business if they did so.
But somehow, we haven't seemed to extend this level of safety standard from entertainment facilities,
to something far more crucial in saving lives - all of our hospitals worldwide.
Japan enacted a safety standard much like this with Covid-19 -
giving triage requirements that would keep their hospitals within capacity,
without overwhelming them -
a true sign of doctor competence in managing their health facilities.
Because of this, Japan has seen only a fraction of a year of their normal cold season deaths
due to the entire Covid-19 pandemic.
But, time-and-time again,
in the countries seeing the most Covid-19 deaths,
we've seen this same phrase over-and-over: "overwhemed hospitals".
Quite simply, an overwhelmed hospital should not even be a possibility,
if competent doctors were managing those facilities.
Any given hospital can be evaluated by professionals, the same way as a fire marshal might,
to determine the maximum capacity that facility can handle,
and the capacity of that hospital must be maintained and managed at all costs,
with the loss of their licenses on the line.
Triage is the process of determining the priority of patients coming in to a hospital.
It is exactly at this point when patients should be turned away and/or discharged,
based on priority, to always maintain the hospital at its safe capacity,
while addressing the needs of the highest-priority patients.
Otherwise, the life of every single patient at that hospital is being endangered,
and the doctors have failed at the very core of the Hippocratic Oath -
doing harm to every last one of their patients, and putting all of their lives at risk.
If doctors can not manage their health care facilities to the same level of safety as a movie theater,
they are dangerously, deadly incompetent, and actively killing patients.
With 91% of US Covid-19 deaths happening at health care facilities,
and the United States seeing around 16 times the Covid-19 death rate of Japan,
this incompetence is exactly what caused most of the deaths in this pandemic.
