"why haven't we seen massive campaigns to expand that capacity?"
Maybe we should, but we are talking about an astounding cost, with ongoing upkeep, for once-every-hundred-year events. And that's just for new facilities - we already have nursing shortages.
Instead, we (and just about every other country) have used mitigation efforts to reduce the transmission rate when hospital capacity is threatened. It's a lot cheaper and can be done quickly, unlike building new ICU capacity and training new doctors and nurses (many of whom would be out of the job once the pandemic is over).
You say this is expensive and hard, but so what? Isn’t that what you do when a pandemic occurs?
You also point out we have a nursing shortage currently (we did before the pandemic as well). Isn’t that a reason why we should do this? Kill two birds with one stone … solve the prior nursing shortage with a training and hiring blitz.
Expanding hospitals, building new hospitals and training scores of new highly-skilled staff all takes many years. In addition to being extraordinarily expensive.
And then what? The pandemic ends and we have incredibly expensive facilities sitting empty (but still incurring maintenance costs forever) and a surplus of highly-trained staff who cannot find jobs because 98% of the time, we simply don't need any more capacity than we had in 2019.
Training staff does take time but new hospitals can be built quickly. The Chinese built an entire new hospital in 10 days. It probably isn't as good as a modern US hospital, but it's better than nothing.
The mitigation efforts have cost trillions of dollars in relief spending to make up for the economic damage they caused. Could we not have expanded capacity with one or two of the trillions we spent?
Maybe we should, but we are talking about an astounding cost, with ongoing upkeep, for once-every-hundred-year events. And that's just for new facilities - we already have nursing shortages.
Instead, we (and just about every other country) have used mitigation efforts to reduce the transmission rate when hospital capacity is threatened. It's a lot cheaper and can be done quickly, unlike building new ICU capacity and training new doctors and nurses (many of whom would be out of the job once the pandemic is over).