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Isn’t “percentage of occupied beds w/ covid” a terrible metric? As states open up and elective surgeries, car accidents etc increase the denominator will inevit
by kippinitreal 6y ago
Isn’t “percentage of occupied beds w/ covid” a terrible metric? As states open up and elective surgeries, car accidents etc increase the denominator will inevitably increase and this will appear to go down regardless of any positive change. What is wrong with the much simpler metric of “number of beds used by covid patients”?
- DFHippie 6y agoIt seems like what you want is the percentage of hospital beds dedicated to covid patients, or perhaps the percentage of beds unoccupied, since the purpose of the curve flattening effort is to keep the health care system from collapsing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Isn’t “percentage of occupied beds w/ covid” a terrible metric? It's not perfect, but in terms of the readily available data, it's not terrible. > As states open up and elective surgeries, car accidents etc increase the denominator will inevitably increase OTOH, there's a credible argument that that is a kind of positive progress itself. And, no, it's not inevitable that the denominator will go up if COVID already has hospitals at capacity. > What is wrong with the much simpler metric of “number of beds used by covid patients”? That's a good measure for any state, but bad for comparing conditions among states. Share of available hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients might be better, but “available” is not always clear since physical capacity and staffing and other support may not yield the same maximum. Because of required staffing ratios, etc.