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Is there any context to that number? I’d be very interested in seeing how many beds were free this day in 2019, 2018, etc. It’s not a secret that hospitals ar
by xienze 6y ago
Is there any context to that number? I’d be very interested in seeing how many beds were free this day in 2019, 2018, etc. It’s not a secret that hospitals are designed to run at or near capacity at all times, I don’t know where the notion that hospitals run at 40% capacity at all times in order to account for the random once-in-a-century pandemic comes from.
- 0-_-0 6y agoThere's a link in a sibling comment pointing to data from 2019 January where 151 out of 1033 adult critical care beds in London were free (14.6%), and in January 2020 146 out of 1034 were free
- akiselev 6y agoEven now ICU utilization nationwide in the United States is only ~63% [1]. Regardless of country, ICUs are not supposed to be run at capacity as a matter of practice - the staffing level in ICUs is on the order of one to three people per patient and it's not a resource that can be scaled up or down quickly. For a large metro area like London, you might have some hospitals at high utilization because they're very close to other ICUs and can redirect incoming patients. It's not supposed to be at high utilization regionally, otherwise a single minor disaster can cause the system to tailspin. [1] https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-capacity https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-capacity
- flukus 6y agoComparisons to previous years don't really make sense. ICU capacity should have somewhat increased and in previous years they weren't anticipating such a massive influx of new patients.