It's lonely work. The absolute answer to this based on watching the last Advisory Board of Health Meeting, apparently the upper decision making structure of the Health Department budgets money. That being said, the Boyd Center says 8.3% of our population does not have insurance, the US Census Bureau says that number is 12.3% or roughly fifty percent more, which means at an average of ten covid patients a day, we currently have 60, there should be a line item in this budget for at least 3,029, 500 dollars for indigent covid care alone. Since this yearly number is likely closer to 10,000,000 (and was considerably more in our previous two years fighting covid) we are at the point where the number is starting to become a real burden on our County budget, those funds have to come from government or volunteer agencies which generally have a much broader purpose than paying covid debt. In other words, we are allowing covid debt to take over and dominate all our indigent care. That money is going to have to come from somewhere, and it looks like right now Mayor Jacobs is trying to cover up the fact that this budget line item even exists by cannibalizing the money from other budgeted areas. This would indicate that we haven't bottomed out in the medical infrastructure collapse and that Lisa Edwards and the ambulance crisis are but the first of many situations relating to the ongoing mismanagement of our medical infrastructure. The city and Counties I have been using in comparison, Madison , Dane County Wi. topped out at 22 patients this surge with a vaccination rate of 45%. We have a vaccination rate (based on bivalent booster) of about 8.3%. We are currently showing 60 patients and that number could possibly still rise depending upon where the hospitalization curve lies in relation to the known cases curve. We have a ways to go before we become completely non-functioning, but I would submit we are traveling down that road faster than any community in America.