The manflu debate

[NickFitz]

It is nonetheless the case that there's no way L&D Hospital has 240 intensive care beds. They'd have to be expecting a hundred-vehicle-pile-up on the M1 every hour or two to have made such extensive provision for critical care, and you can't turn the wards that normally cope with hernias and such into an ICU overnight.

Nor can you train the staff so rapidly: ICU nursing is itself a speciality, and a trained nurse is allocated to each patient on an ICU ward. We didn't even get that level of attention in the Coronary Care Unit (although that might be because of people like me who cope with the boredom by deliberately slowing their heart rate so that it sets off the alarm for bradycardia and somebody has to come down and reset the bleepy machine).

I don't know what your friend or neighbour was trying to say about there being 240 people with flu, but they don't have 240 people in the ICU unless they've carried out major modifications to the premises, and if they had 240 people in need of critical care all at the same time it would suggest that Luton and Dunstable are in the grip of an epidemic along the lines of the cholera outbreak of 1854.

I posit that your acquaintance was speaking of there being 240 serious cases nationwide at the time you had this conversation. At a pinch it might be the case that 240 people are in L&D Hospital with flu, but there's no way they are all in the ICU, or needing to be.

FWIW, the best place in the country for treating life-threatening flu is my local

[MarillionFan]

Your whole post leans on the fact that a tabloid newspaper printed fact.

When you get to big school MF you will learn that papers don't always research their facts before printing them.

No you're right. I read the paper and then based it on the fact that no hospital has 240 intensive care beds plus common sense.

I am obviously wrong. I phoned Luton hospital and they confirmed your friends statement. The hospital has says that they have had the army set up a field hospital in the car park and shopping centre across the road. Helicopters are bringing in those with swine flu and Kleenex have backed the whole thing. Aid has been flooding in from Iraq and the UN are standing by. They have also bought in Doogie Howser, Doctor Shipman and Florence Nightingale. 2 million have died, house prices have dropped by 50%, ATW still can't afford a bedsit and
The BNP are to take over the council.

I am sorry i doubted you.