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1.6 Numbers in #Lebanon are mysterious, at best impressionistic (they require a Kabbalistic interpretation!); from the population estimates (from 4 to 10 million), to the Banque du Liban's "other assets" (a black-box with a life of its own) & lately to the estimates of ICU beds..
2.6 As per the Ministry of Public Health (April 2020), public hospitals have 222 ventilators and 419 ICU beds in contrast to private hospitals (1242 ventilators and 2391 ICU beds)
3.6 As per the United Nations (May 2020), "Initially the public sector had only 140 ICU beds, while 300 beds will have to be availed by the private sector." They estimated back then that 700 ICU beds will be needed at the peak of the epidemic and that these were not yet met....
4.6 In a recent series of tweets (July 2020) by the advisor to PM Hassan Diab, Petra Khoury shared this graph which put the number of ICU beds nationally at 260-280...
5.6 In his comments to Khoury's tweets @firassabiad (head of the main referral hospital in Beirut for Covid19) hinted that the no. of ICU beds may have decreased nationally given the economic crisis. Of course,this is catastrophic news as the country enters an upsurge of cases
6.6 But by how much did they decrease? And what do we conclude from this mishmash of numbers?
