With limited supplies a good high speed rail system, France is moving covid-19 patients around to spread out the burden on hospitals. They are converting high speed passenger equipment that is not in demand to fast moving hospital/medical transport cars. Perhaps we will end up following a similar approach to spread out the treatments demands, though it certainly wouldn't be high speed outside of the NE corridor!
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jhz563 posted:With limited supplies a good high speed rail system, France is moving covid-19 patients around to spread out the burden on hospitals. They are converting high speed passenger equipment that is not in demand to fast moving hospital/medical transport cars. Perhaps we will end up following a similar approach to spread out the treatments demands, though it certainly wouldn't be high speed outside of the NE corridor!
All well and good, for a small country the size of France (isn't the state of Texas twice the size of France?). Doesn't sound logical for the U.S., especially since lots of hotels/convention centers are now being converted to hold/treat the increasing number of those infected.
Those high speed trains are like Airplanes. They are closed tubes with self contained ventilatins systems that keep recirculating the same air. I think it would scary to be on one knowing that people with the virus where breathing into the same system.
I'd like to see a map of that route. I did a driving circle tour and encountered that train/route only once east/SE of Paris, and saw most tourist sites, but smaller cities, not getting into some, but hunting history and scenery. I expected to encounter it in the south, SE, or west, or even the north but did not. (When l saw it, it was moving like a bat out of....) So l wonder where it goes, and how happy people in smaller cities will be to have contagious patients imported?
Hot Water posted:All well and good, for a small country the size of France (isn't the state of Texas twice the size of France?).
Well, larger, but twice the size.
France: 248,573 sq/mi; Texas: 268,597 sq/mi
However, I don't know how effective it is to shuttle the people around, I'd think bringing the resources closer to the people that need them would be a better option.
Reminds me of "The Cassandra Crossing" movie.
Rusty
Didn't see the France thing, but did see Gov Cuomo talking about potentially doing that for NY to spread out the taxing of the health care network/hospitals (no word if they will use trains or vehicles). He suggested "downstate" (anything NYC and it's suburbs for those not familiar with New Yawk slang 
) people could easily end up being treated at facilities more in the central part of the state that don't have the high concentration of cases that NYC and it's suburbs currently have.
Not 100% sure about the temporary facilities being set up in convention centers, but it was specifically mentioned the Naval Hospital Ship that is NY bound (and it's sibling that is docked in LA, if memory serves) would be used for other patients not suffering from COVID-19, as the ships are not designed for dealing with something like this.
That of course frees up beds in the hospitals themselves though, which are presumably more able to be configured to treat the virus. The point being that "bringing facilities that are capable of dealing with the virus to the people" may not be feasible due to many factors (facility design, personnel availability, etc). If there is a hospital 3 hours away that is all set up and can treat people (well, as best as can be treated right now), and it does not have a n overflow of need for it's own population, that's probably better care than being in a temporary facility that had to be assembled quickly and may not really be appropriate for the tasks at hand.
-Dave
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