You mean horizontal line. But, no, you haven't read it wrong. Critical Care facilities are not sized to cope with this. In the UK Critical Care beds (at 8 per 100,000 population) get overflowed in anything other than a mild flu season. I doubt the US is in any better situation despite having 14 critical care beds per 100,000.
Yes, I meant
vertical horizontal lin and made that correction twice. I'm not asking for an explanation of hospital bed number or surge capability. That information is available from many other sources and has been for a very long time. Nor is it particularly helpful to simply state "not sized to cope with this", because, in my opinion, it simply sounds too smug. It is the details of the *this* that are up for reasonable discussion, otherwise a simple - "we're fuxored" is sufficient and need not be embellished upon.
What is under intensive scrutiny here is the accuracy of the calculations. Take a step back. What the Brits have done here is characterized the disease with particular respect to required care by the Health Institutions. Further, the course of that load requirement has been projected under different non-pharmacological interventions (NPI).
The most stringent NPI, which we in the US are heading for or are currently at, does not overload health care until a resurgence of infections in NOV. Under that scenario, a window of time exists to develop AND deploy pharmacological interventions, which would mitigate the resurgence in infections predicted for NOV.
To develop and deploy a vaccine in 8 months is unreasonable under any Phase 1, Phase 2a...etc FDA process that I am familiar with. While ~a year gets bandied about, it is a best case scenario in my view. Vaccines, however, are under development worldwide, even though in the US the very first trial has just now begun (afaik).
That, potentially, leaves us with non-vaccine pharmacological intervention in that short time window.
Administering antibodies is not a fantasy (take that #BoomerRemover, we are going to harvest your blood
)
Antivirals (all the *virs and others (e.g.,
https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/analysis/coronavirus-mers-cov-drugs/ ) are under consideration. Compassionate use might allow some deployment of some drugs within that time window, but completely novel treatments are going to be subject to the same basic FDA route - again in my view.
So, the prediction of the NOV surge, as described, is a very big issue. If you (i.e., anybody) has read the report, knows a good deal about modelling, and can comment on the confidence of that prediction, I would sure like to hear about it.