This preprint from Marc Lipsitch and colleagues is relevant,
Li R, Rivers C, Tan Q, Murray MB, Toner E, Lipsitch M. 2020. The Demand for Inpatient and ICU Beds for COVID-19 in the US: Lessons From Chinese Cities. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42599304
See their Figure 1 where they plot the hospitalization rate during the Wuhan epidemic against US hospital bed capacity to give an idea of how quickly the US would be overloaded in a “Wuhan-like outbreak”. They consider ICU beds (2.8 per 10000 adults), empty ICU beds (31.8% of all ICU beds), and what they call “US inpatient beds in community hospitals” (29.7 per 10000 adults). The sum of ICU and community beds comes out to ~850000 based on an adult US population of 240 million, which isn’t too far off from your 924107 number.
Two things to keep in mind for working through your question about the implications of 10^6 (concurrent) cases (I see these are reiterating points Mark already made): On the one hand, most symptomatic cases will not need hospitalization. On the other hand, most hospital beds are occupied (~70% of ICU beds, which roughly agrees with Mark’s 66% estimate for overall beds), so the number of available beds is much less than the total number of staffed beds.
I’ve heard it suggested that today’s declared national state of emergency and associated funding may enable things like FEMA building field hospitals to extend hospital bed capacity.
Based on googling “hospital occupancy rates”, about 66% of beds are already in use on any given day. Doctors I’ve talked to have said that extremely busy days result in near or over 100% capacity.
I expect that there is going to be gradual overload as COVID spreads through various communities, e.g. we’re starting to see Washington hospitals starting to be overloaded
A rough estimate: there are ~333k empty hospital beds, a doubling time of 4 days, 300 new cases today, 0.2 percent of patients hospitalized and 14 days per hospitalization. Thus we want to solve for k such that ∑k+14n=k0.2∗300∗2(k/4)>333,000, giving k > 34, so hospitals will be overloaded in 34 days. This estimate assumes that patients are distributed uniformly throughout all hospitals, so it’s more of an upper bound given unchecked exponential growth.
Edit: Rob Wiblin provides an estimate (on FB) of 15k new cases in the US every day, giving k > 11.5. I haven’t thought much about 15k new cases, but it seems far more correct than 300.
Can we estimate what level of the disease will overtax US hospitals?
This page says that three are 924,107 “Total Staffed Beds in All U.S. Hospitals.” Is that a good estimate of overall hospital capacity?
Does that mean that if/when ~ 1,000,000 people in the US have symptomatic cases, the hospital system will be at capacity?
Comments on hospital capacity models from other threads in this post:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/coronavirus-open-thread#GXpQihDMgRA7EfgYS
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/coronavirus-open-thread#jC7CGd7KuuwLu5FT5
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/coronavirus-open-thread#mYxKedFDALDS8v2S8
Other models / estimates:
http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/cbn/2020/cbnreport-03132020.html
https://medium.com/@trentmc0/when-does-hospital-capacity-get-overwhelmed-in-usa-germany-a06cf2835f89
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/opinion/coronavirus-trump-response.html
This preprint from Marc Lipsitch and colleagues is relevant,
Li R, Rivers C, Tan Q, Murray MB, Toner E, Lipsitch M. 2020. The Demand for Inpatient and ICU Beds for COVID-19 in the US: Lessons From Chinese Cities. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42599304
See their Figure 1 where they plot the hospitalization rate during the Wuhan epidemic against US hospital bed capacity to give an idea of how quickly the US would be overloaded in a “Wuhan-like outbreak”. They consider ICU beds (2.8 per 10000 adults), empty ICU beds (31.8% of all ICU beds), and what they call “US inpatient beds in community hospitals” (29.7 per 10000 adults). The sum of ICU and community beds comes out to ~850000 based on an adult US population of 240 million, which isn’t too far off from your 924107 number.
Two things to keep in mind for working through your question about the implications of 10^6 (concurrent) cases (I see these are reiterating points Mark already made): On the one hand, most symptomatic cases will not need hospitalization. On the other hand, most hospital beds are occupied (~70% of ICU beds, which roughly agrees with Mark’s 66% estimate for overall beds), so the number of available beds is much less than the total number of staffed beds.
I’ve heard it suggested that today’s declared national state of emergency and associated funding may enable things like FEMA building field hospitals to extend hospital bed capacity.
Edit: see also this blog post by author Eric Toner about the above preprint, http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/cbn/2020/cbnreport-03132020.html
Based on googling “hospital occupancy rates”, about 66% of beds are already in use on any given day. Doctors I’ve talked to have said that extremely busy days result in near or over 100% capacity.
I expect that there is going to be gradual overload as COVID spreads through various communities, e.g. we’re starting to see Washington hospitals starting to be overloaded
A rough estimate: there are ~333k empty hospital beds, a doubling time of 4 days, 300 new cases today, 0.2 percent of patients hospitalized and 14 days per hospitalization. Thus we want to solve for k such that ∑k+14n=k0.2∗300∗2(k/4)>333,000, giving k > 34, so hospitals will be overloaded in 34 days. This estimate assumes that patients are distributed uniformly throughout all hospitals, so it’s more of an upper bound given unchecked exponential growth.
Edit: Rob Wiblin provides an estimate (on FB) of 15k new cases in the US every day, giving k > 11.5. I haven’t thought much about 15k new cases, but it seems far more correct than 300.