06-12-2020, 12:23 PM
Was there ever any reporting done on bed usage?
I found some numbers total acute care and critical care beds in the Region, and the target (in normal times) is apparently 80% utilisation which would have meant roughly 150-160 acute beds free and 14-15 critical beds free on any random day, plus the 24 addition temporary critical care beds that were made from converted surgical suites.
Another CBC article talked about how people spend about 10 days on average in the hospital with Covid-19 unless they need a critical (ICU) care bed, for which it's 20 days on average.
That would mean we could handle up to 15-16 acute covid-19 hospitalisations per day (150 beds / 10 days per stay) or 1.9 critical admissions per day (32 beds / 20 days per stay). That's the point where all beds are always in use and as soon as somebody is discharged their bed is immediately filled by a new case.
Cancelling elective surgeries can help a bit, but it's surprising how much of that is just day surgery. For example, my complete shoulder replacement that should have happened in May takes 4+ hours to complete and I'll get sent home later that same day, and I'm not taking up an acute care bed during those few hours until I get discharged. That means the extra bed spaces gained from cancelling elective surgeries are not that many.
600,000 people in the Region, if 70% of people get infected over the course of a year, all evenly spaced out would be ~1,151 people per day. If 90% of the cases are not counted because of inadequate testing, that leaves ~115 per day.
Have I missed anything in trying work out our local capacity?
According to the Region, 5% of known cases have needed a critical care bed and 15% have needed an acute care bed. 15% of 115 is 17.25 new acute cases per day. 5% 115 is 5.8 new critical cases per day. If they really pushed I'm sure they could find ~20 extra beds for acute cases, but eventually they'd have 3x as many people needing ICU as they can handle.
But spread out nicely over year is something that we know isn;t going going to happen, so I think it's obvious we would be overwhelmed long before the peak if we did nothing.
I found some numbers total acute care and critical care beds in the Region, and the target (in normal times) is apparently 80% utilisation which would have meant roughly 150-160 acute beds free and 14-15 critical beds free on any random day, plus the 24 addition temporary critical care beds that were made from converted surgical suites.
Another CBC article talked about how people spend about 10 days on average in the hospital with Covid-19 unless they need a critical (ICU) care bed, for which it's 20 days on average.
That would mean we could handle up to 15-16 acute covid-19 hospitalisations per day (150 beds / 10 days per stay) or 1.9 critical admissions per day (32 beds / 20 days per stay). That's the point where all beds are always in use and as soon as somebody is discharged their bed is immediately filled by a new case.
Cancelling elective surgeries can help a bit, but it's surprising how much of that is just day surgery. For example, my complete shoulder replacement that should have happened in May takes 4+ hours to complete and I'll get sent home later that same day, and I'm not taking up an acute care bed during those few hours until I get discharged. That means the extra bed spaces gained from cancelling elective surgeries are not that many.
600,000 people in the Region, if 70% of people get infected over the course of a year, all evenly spaced out would be ~1,151 people per day. If 90% of the cases are not counted because of inadequate testing, that leaves ~115 per day.
Have I missed anything in trying work out our local capacity?
According to the Region, 5% of known cases have needed a critical care bed and 15% have needed an acute care bed. 15% of 115 is 17.25 new acute cases per day. 5% 115 is 5.8 new critical cases per day. If they really pushed I'm sure they could find ~20 extra beds for acute cases, but eventually they'd have 3x as many people needing ICU as they can handle.
But spread out nicely over year is something that we know isn;t going going to happen, so I think it's obvious we would be overwhelmed long before the peak if we did nothing.