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by pmayrgundter 2295 days ago
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...

1 comments

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.