Medical inpatient facilities' susceptibility within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Case study of the Czech Republic!

One of the key conditions for the effective protection of residents is ensuring the sufficient capacity and functionality of inpatient medical facilities. However, they can fail or even collapse in some situations for many reasons, such as external disasters, internal dysfunctions, and also because of the surrounding infrastructure's malfunction or an overloaded health system. This vulnerability, which was often overlooked in the past, proved critical during the COVID-19 epidemic, but it can still manifest itself in a variety of other crisis situations. The "domino effect" is also a significant phenomenon, i.e., the spread of impacts to other facilities. Inpatient-oriented medical facilities thus have a function as infrastructure at the level of a large territorial unit, and the experience with COVID-19 provides the knowledge that it is in fact a critical infrastructure. These conclusions are illustrated in the presentations of case studies in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic.