3 ms·
Hospitals around me are at half capacity. San Mateo is at 56% capacity in ICU beds.[1] Covid cases were doubling every 3 days (up to 5). Would it be correct t
by gabaix 6y ago
Hospitals around me are at half capacity. San Mateo is at 56% capacity in ICU beds.[1]
Covid cases were doubling every 3 days (up to 5).
Would it be correct to say that had we waited another week, hospitals would have been overrun?
If that's the case then I understand why health authorities are cautious.
[1] https://www.smchealth.org/post/san-mateo-county-covid-19-data-1 https://www.smchealth.org/post/san-mateo-county-covid-19-dat...
- marcell 6y agoTypically a hospitals run at near full capacity, especially during flu season. I have a friend who works at the Kaiser in Oakland in ER, and she says it has been pretty empty right now, relative to a typical flu season. The data linked shows about half the beds are taken up by COVID-19 patients, and the other half are other cases. They claim to have 77 standard ICU beds, and 300 surge beds available. Of those, 34% of the standard and 94% of the surge beds are unused. So out of 377 total beds, 5% are taken up by COVID-19 patients. I think it's hard to estimate the doubling rate based on the numbers we have out there. Confirmed cases is a poor proxy for actual cases, since it depends a lot on testing rates, who gets tested, etc. A lot of new data is suggesting that coronavirus spread further we previously though, and that it started spreading in America sooner than we previously though. We don't know the true numbers because they didn't start testing for coronavirus in America until March, and even then it was at a very low rate.