Looks like it's going to be a big year if you work in health. Apparently we've got a total of 2,000 ICU beds in Australia, or 8 per 100,000 people. The rate of spread elsewhere seems to suggest resources will be overstretched in about one to two months. From Italy I've seen an anecdotal report of patients presenting with strokes and trauma being skipped due to the desperate situation of many COVID-19 patients.
My partner's an ICU registrar. Her Darwin department is already planning on the basis its resources will be used up, and that they'll have to devote everything to ventilating people with the worse range of symptoms, convert operating theatres, etc. We're both assuming she'll be exposed to the virus, which makes it very likely I will too.
On a personal note, she's currently killing herself studying for her first big specialist exam in a few months, doing maybe thirty hours of bookwork a week on top of a full time workload, and has now heard it may be cancelled for the year due to this situation.
The territorial government has also announced all non-essential travel to the region's remote Aboriginal communities is barred. Great news as the communities have terrible general health indicators, and a spread of the virus in them would probably mean a steady stream of emergency airlifts from relatively difficult to reach places.
