Sh*t Mardi Gras

ZeroHedge thinks all U.S. hospital beds will be filled due to Kung Flu cases by May 8th.

Au contraire, mes amis.

ZeroHedge's Tyler Durden knows what he knows, and doesn't know what he doesn't know.

1) The number of ICU beds already full is closer to 90%, most days, esp. during flu season, i.e. every day since Thanksgiving.

2) There's already a severe shortage of N95 masks, and all protective apparel. With damned close to zero Kung Flu patients hospitalized anywhere. And that's only going to get worse.

3) Because of #1 & #2, there won't be a shortage of hospital beds.
Quite simply, unless you're almost abso-fucking-lutely dying right this minute, you will not be getting a hospital bed.
Now. Then. Ever.

4) Napkin math says you'll need 5M cases of Kung Flu to get 1M who need a hospital. We're currently a long way from 5M cases, even if this doubles every 4-6 days.
(Remember Ebola Math: there are 34 doubles from 1 to Everyone.
The first ten get you to 1000. the second ten get you to 1M. So to get to 5M, you need 23 or so doublings. At 4-6 days per double, that's 92-138 days. So if that's the doubling speed, we will be at 5M cases by June, anyways. Not May. But in a pandemic, doublings speed up and slow down, as the virus hits new pockets of people, and then runs through them.)
Regardless, at some point, we'll get to 1M Kung Flu victims who need a bed.

5) None of that matters, because less than 10% of them will ever get in.

6) Because long before then, we'll either decide to stop seeing them, or hospital care at all will cease to exist, from staff infections, lack of supplies, people who'll stop coming to work, etc.

7) At that point, there will functionally be zero hospital beds.
Either because no one with Kung Flu will be let in, or because there isn't a hospital. I can tell you right now, we aren't going to turn away heart attacks, strokes, and trauma patients so we can see people with Kung Flu, even if they're really effing sick. I've told you, "Don't get this virus." This is why.

If you have URI symptoms, you'll be triaged outside to a tent, and then transmogrified and transported to some CDC-approved empty warehouse, sports arena, convention center, etc., where you'll get the best care you can from totally untrained amateurs, retirees brave enough to risk it, and people too stupid to turn that work down. Think former barristas, people too dumb to pass the TSA civil service exam, and the guys too stupid to make it delivering pizzas or spinning signs. The number of licensed folks there, like doctors or nurses, will be countable on one's thumbs. There will be somewhere between vastly inadequate PPE, to no PPE. They will be short of everything but patients.

And as friend ASM826 at Borepatch's blog has noted, even hospital staff can wear full Level A encapsulating suits in the hospital, but if they aren't wearing them to their front yard decon station, and staying inside afterwards, they're going to get Kung Flu from the general population anyways, in short order.

8) That is an S3 event.
It is not a Shit Show.
It is not a Shit Circus.
It will be a Shit Mardi Gras.

So Tyler's analysis is too cheery by a couple orders of magnitude.

{If you were wondering, the higher levels are, in ascending order, A Shit Riot, A Shit Tsunami, and a Shit Apocalypse.
You do not want to see an S5 or S6 event, believe me.
Moses' ten plagues on Egypt were only an S5. The only S6 in recorded human history was Noah's Flood.}