I'm not sure how to interpret that table. The range of beds/person is amazing to me. Does that mean that some countries have more demand for beds or that some countries have shorter hospital stays (one bed serves more people per unit time) or that some countries have too few beds with people being turned away. Probably all of the above.
So that table just caused me to ask more questions rather than answering any.
I also don't understand that chart, but perhaps the huge range must mean there are some underlying different assumptions, calculations, or methodologies.
This study looks at ICU/Critical Care beds, and finds also a large range but quite different ranking as above:
This pandemic specifically requires assistance breathing for a huge amount of people. I'm not sure how closely that correlates to hospital beds, but it could be a big issue in the US where many hospital-like things are dealt with by urgent care.
What is the overall infection prognosis for the US? For Germany it is expected that 60 to 70% of the population will get Covid-19. Assuming 65% for the US, that would mean 214M infected, say over 2 years (and assuming linearity, which is naive) and each critical case needing care for a month, we are talking about nearly 18M critical cases per month. So yes, a huge amount of people.
GP lists overall hospital beds per people, which includes ICU beds but also encompasses the "normal" beds, e.g. for people recovering from routine procedures, kids with broken legs etc.
So the US has 277 hospital beds per 100k inhabitants, of which 20-31.7 are intensive care beds.
China has 434 hospital beds per 100k inhabitants, of which 2.8-4.6 are intensive care beds.
I'd say overall this may be one factor for assessing quality of healthcare, but also explains the respective system's focus on ambulant vs. stationary care.
It’s also the case that the US health system disincentivizes preventative care, which may stress our health system even relative to the capacity of beds (more may be used for true emergencies than might be the case for other countries). This will be the first non-localized shock in quite a while and only time will tell how bad it gets here.
The US is relatively short on staffing (we don't try very hard to train doctors, nursing is a reasonably well compensated but unpleasant job, etc).
And then Medicare has a wild model where they work to centralize care at regional hospitals. The local hospital here gets paid more per Medicare procedure by not staffing rooms that it does have (this is basically universal among rural US hospitals that were built more than 10 years ago).
I'm not sure how to interpret that table. The range of beds/person is amazing to me. Does that mean that some countries have more demand for beds or that some countries have shorter hospital stays (one bed serves more people per unit time) or that some countries have too few beds with people being turned away. Probably all of the above.
So that table just caused me to ask more questions rather than answering any.