[FRIAM] health care logistics

[glen]

New York and other north-eastern US states see a rapid fall in Covid cases
Despite decreasing positivity rates, hospitals continue to struggle amid a surging patient load and staff shortages
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/17/us-coronavirus-cases-decrease-latest

I still don't see it much in the way these news stories are structured. But even from the beginning of the pandemic, people who work in health care logistics watched hospitalizations closer than cases or deaths. Staffing, availability of equipment, beds, local population and demographics, hospital tier, ambulance services, etc. are all part of public health. It's fine to focus on things like potable water, pollution, poverty, etc. But being able to see a professional (including psychiatric and pharmacy services) when you need one is of equal or greater importance than the product supply chain disruptions everyone is complaining about.

Why do we care so much about having access to yet-another-brand of soft drink, but care so little about having access to, say, negative pressure hospital rooms? How many such rooms are needed per population? Surely there exist buzzword-rich scalable approaches (6σ, JIT, etc.) to such questions. And I'd bet those approaches are taken seriously and applied rigorously to, say, getting the PS5 to "vulnerable populations" of gamers. I'd like to see more attention paid in the press to health care logistics.

-- 
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.