How many ICU beds has Italy? A source I saw said US had the most per capita.
“AHA data: According to the AHA 2015 annual survey, the United States had 4862 acute care registered hospitals; 2814 of these had at least 10 acute care beds and at least 1 ICU bed. These hospitals had a total of 540,668 staffed beds and 94,837 ICU beds (14.3% ICU beds/total beds) in 5229 ICUs. There were 46,490 medical-surgical beds in 2644 units, 14,731 cardiac beds in 976 units, 6588 other beds in 379 units, 4698 pediatric beds in 307 units, and 22,330 neonatal beds in 920 units. The median number of beds in medical-surgical, cardiac, and other units was 12, with 10 beds in pediatrics and 18 in neonatal. Fifty-two percent of hospitals had 1 unit, 24% had 2 units, and 24% had 3 or more units.”
https://www.sccm.org/Communications/Critical-Care-Statistics
All I can find now, but pretty impressive
Italy got overwhelmed because of their large Chinese worker enclave. We may not.
This is gonna hit quick—so we will know in a couple of weeks where we are..
They key is how many of them are occupied at any time.
The capacity of the ICU over time is pretty straight forward. It’s the number of beds, the average stay, and length of time to turn over the bed (cleaning, stocking, and staffing.)
A normal stay in ICU is something like 3-5 full days. The CV ICU stay is about twice that. And it includes breathing machines and other life assisting machines.
The hospital could turn those rooms over in an hour (pretty remarkable time to sterilize the room.). In any decent sized city, with 36 ICU rooms per hospital, the hospital would be gummed up in a week.
If you think about it, there are usually no empty rooms. So from day 1, the average stay is going to start doubling because for every 3-5 day stay that leaves is going to be replaced by a 10-14 day stay. In less than a week you would have NO turnover for 5-7 days.
And at the same time the regular patients stack up. And at the same time the CV patients are showing up.
And you overflow to another hospital...for about two days. Then they are in the same position.
Where are you going to put ALL the new ICU patients?
That’s how easily this can happen. It really doesn’t take much.
This is going to screw China as far as being "low cost factory" for the world.
But it's going to screw up their sending gazillions of students to the US, no matter *how* much cash they wave at Universities: if the pandemic really gets cooking among the Chinese students.