Proportion of ICU Patients Requiring Ventilation
“FluSurge 2.0 assumes 50% of patients with seasonal influenza admitted to the ICU require ventilation (22). HSC assumes 50% throughout a pandemic (21), and HHS uses 50.4% for a moderate scenario and 50% for a severe scenario”
Proportion of Ventilated Patients Requiring 2 Weeks of Ventilation
“FluSurge 2.0 (22) assumes that ventilatory support of Influenza Like Illness patients lasts 10 days.
One useful thing we can all do on FR is to dig out data and make it more available. That helps others since FR gets indexed by search engines fairly frequently.
The apparent need for large numbers of ventilators in areas where COVID-19 outbreaks occur, and the extent to which public health organizations seem concerned with the availability of ventilators suggests that either they are being used at a higher rate for COVID-19 patients, or the COVID-19 caseload is much more concentrated in time than for influenza outbreaks, or the public health people are incompetent. The latter seems unlikely as a first order explanation, since they are being guided by the same organization that published the paper you provided, and most of them participated in an August 2019 exercise related to pandemic preparedness.
The only data value which appears to be different between the influenza modeling and the reported COVID-19 data is the rate of hospitalizations relative to illnesses. But that data is of course very hard to know early in an epidemic. Some Chinese papers suggest a higher hospitalization ratio for COVID-19, which would if applied to the Huang models increase the ventilator usage substantially.