Right!
This on top of flu and usual medical needs.
Italy becoming overwhelmed at 8,000 cases.
I’m suggesting that our medical system is overwhelmed at 25,000...maybe 30,000?
Would like US physician weigh in on this.
BREAKING: Denmark reports sharp increase in cases of coronavirus, adding 174 cases in the past 24 hours, taking total to 264
We have a total of ~925k hospital beds in the nation.
We keep them about 65% utilized, on average.
There are approximately 300k beds open, on average.
But the flu is using some as it’s still having a moderate seasonal impact.
Let’s say for the sake of argument there are 250k beds open.
How many of those beds are at least isolated? How many in ICU?
How many can handle SARS?
I know some stats from research:
There are about 1 million total hospital beds in the United States.
Of these about 40% are available at any one time.
Of this the percentage of ICU beds is much smaller...estimated to be around 80,000 beds or so. A mild flu season is one in which 5% of the population gets the flu.
There are 370 million people in the US. 5% of that is 18,500,000.
IF the coronavirus spreads as much as a mild flu season that means that 18,500,000 will be infected.
Of those infected by Corona 80% will be mild likely requiring no medical intervention. The rest are severe to critical...usually 15% severe and 5% critical.
IF ONLY the critical 5% have to be admitted to a hospital that means 925,000 people will need ICU units.
There's not near enough beds just for that. 80,000 critical care beds total (not all available) and 925,000 needing beds.
If there are 30,000 cases in spread evenly around the country and we use the 5% critical figure that means that 1500 will need critical care. That's workable.
But the problem is that there will be geographic clusters. 30,000 cases in a smaller geographic area will overwhelm the local resources.
The scary part is that these are all BEST CASE scenarios. Only spreads as much as a mild flu. Only the critically ill (those who would die otherwise) are hospitalized. In reality it spreads more easily than the flu and there are more than 5% that have to be hospitalized.
I think we had 60 million cases of H1N1