Earlier this month, we warned that Australia’s hospital system was already dangerously short of hospital beds before the coronavirus outbreak, given it has only 3.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people – only slightly better than Italy and less than one-third Korea and Japan:
The Grattan Institute followed claiming that at current growth rates, Australia would run out of ICU beds by mid-April:
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Australia has been doubling every 3-to-4 days… a shutdown of anything that isn’t truly essential will be needed to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system…
