The Crisis of Alaska Running Out Of ICU Beds

 

The devil is always in the detail. There was a news story last night about the crisis in Anchorage, Alaska hospitals. Like many other locations, almost every ICU bed is filled with a Covid-19 patient. Please have a look at Alaska's location on the map. It is isolated and distant from the rest of the United States. If the hospitals run out of ICU beds, they cannot just send patients nearby. It would be problematic to send them to Canada. Washington State is where these patients have to go. (A minimum of 3 hours in the air.) One does not just wrap a patient in a blanket and put them in the coach section of a commercial airliner. A medical evacuation is required. A special plane with medical personnel must be used to transport the very ill patient. As a very experienced international traveler, I buy insurance that would pay in the event of an emergency medical evacuation. The price of a flight like this could easily exceed $100,000 US. We also have to consider the patients who might die while in transit.