Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cjbprime 2296 days ago
Yes. Both Italy and the US are below average. South Korea and Japan, currently taking extremely drastic measures like mass-closing schools, have around 5x as many beds as either.

I'm in the US, but if you think that makes me think the US is prepared, you have it backwards. I'd guess that if we're not in worse shape than Italy in two weeks, we'll be very lucky.

1 comments

Agreed.

For the country as a whole, I have it at 20 days until we run out of beds. Like Italy, seems reasonable to expect some areas will hit it sooner.

Here's my growth equation:

BedsNeeded = CurrentCases * DailyGrowthRate ^ DaysOfGrowth * SevereAndCriticalRate

708 = CurrentCases, the number of COVID-19 cases in the US as of March 9, 2020. [1]

1.6 = DailyGrowthRate, Number of today's cases / Number of yesterday's cases. [2]

20 = DaysOfGrowth, how many days to run the simulation.

0.1 = SevereAndCriticalRate, the percentage of cases requiring a hospital bed. [3]

855,919 = BedsNeeded

This is based on the above-quoted 2.77 beds per 1000 people, and a US population of 327.2M people, for 906,344 beds available.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ [2] Ibid, rough average of last week's growth rate [3] Rough guess from above comments and other reading.

Working sheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15CRanm0MHyappT_3J1qc...

Also keep in mind that we need ICU beds (ventilators) in particular for this, and that they have some base rate of utilization unrelated to COVID-19 that isn't easily moved.