A 2017 OECD ranking also found that Canada was one of the countries least likely to have an acute care bed available for use. Even before COVID-19, 91.6 per cent of Canadian acute care beds already had someone in them, a rate that was worse only in Israel and Ireland. In the U.S., average occupancy rate on acute care beds was just 64 per cent. In the U.K. it was 84.3 per cent.
Canada also ranks near the back of the pack in overall hospital beds. The latest numbers from the OECD show Canada with just one hospital bed for every 400 citizens , a ratio that put us in the bottom tier of OECD countries. In France, there’s a hospital bed for every 172 citizens, and in Japan (the first place contender) there’s a bed for every 78 people.
Throughout the pandemic, provincial health systems became critically overwhelmed by levels of hospitalization that wouldn’t even phase the average British or American hospital. In September, economists for CIBC calculated that hospitals in both the U.K. and the U.S. didn’t reach their “peak” until hospitalizations were as much as five times higher than what it took to max-out a Canadian hospital. “Simply put, we reached capacity at levels that many other countries consider to be acceptable,” wrote the authors .
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