[Question] What’s the expected QALY (quality-adjusted life years) loss per capita due to SARS-COV-2? QALY gain of increasing ICU capacity? Of buying new ventilators?
In my online echo chambers and news bubbles it seems that a lot of effort worldwide is spent on obtaining more ventilators and increasing ICU capacity. Given that 75% (edit: this value might be too high; 50% might be closer to the truth, according to a comment below) of patients on ventilators die anyway, a single patient occupies an ICU bed for weeks, and that most of the dead are old or have serious pre-existing conditions, I wonder how much good that does.
I strongly suspect that more is spent on those efforts than they are worth because the reports or overwhelmed ICU units are so visually and emotionally captivating. But I’m too lazy to look up the numbers (and the QALY estimate would probably require some original modelling, which I have no experience with).
Related fun fact: Americans spend disproportionately more money on healthcare in their final years. This study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1464043/ (I haven’t checked whether it’s been reproduced) suggests 18-25%, depending on the source of funding. It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds, though, because you don’t know in advance which year is going to be the final one.
[Question] What’s the expected QALY (quality-adjusted life years) loss per capita due to SARS-COV-2? QALY gain of increasing ICU capacity? Of buying new ventilators?
In my online echo chambers and news bubbles it seems that a lot of effort worldwide is spent on obtaining more ventilators and increasing ICU capacity. Given that 75% (edit: this value might be too high; 50% might be closer to the truth, according to a comment below) of patients on ventilators die anyway, a single patient occupies an ICU bed for weeks, and that most of the dead are old or have serious pre-existing conditions, I wonder how much good that does.
I strongly suspect that more is spent on those efforts than they are worth because the reports or overwhelmed ICU units are so visually and emotionally captivating. But I’m too lazy to look up the numbers (and the QALY estimate would probably require some original modelling, which I have no experience with).
Related fun fact: Americans spend disproportionately more money on healthcare in their final years. This study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1464043/ (I haven’t checked whether it’s been reproduced) suggests 18-25%, depending on the source of funding. It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds, though, because you don’t know in advance which year is going to be the final one.