One of the main threats of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it will overwhelm the medical system. Therefore when thinking about that risk, it would be useful to know how big the medical system is. Hence, this table:
A few observations about the table:
- It’s easy to see how a few tens of thousands of serious cases could overwhelm the estimated spare capacity of intensive care beds and perhaps ventilators as well.
- Typical number of hospital visits is equivalent to over 10% of the population per year and almost 700,000 a week. At first I couldn’t believe that number. However, if people spend most of their life needing to go once every 10 or 20 years, and a few people need to go much more often due to age or illness, than we can easily get to that number. It looks to me like you would need hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations in order to overload hospitals in general, as opposed to specifically ICUs.
- There are millions of medical professionals in the US. As with hospitals, it looks like we don’t run short of doctors and nurses until we get hundreds of thousands of patients – unless a large number of caregivers also get sick, which is a plausible risk. I’m not sure what patient/nurse/doctor ratio COVID-19 calls for.
- Almost 3 million people a year die from all causes, about 50,000 a week. That is much more than the US has seen so far from COVID-19. However in a normal year about a thousand people a week die of flu and pneumonia, which is comparable to the current coronavirus death rate in some countries. So flu/pneumonia numbers could have large increases due to the new virus. That means that even if any hospitals are not testing everyone with flu-like symptoms, the death statistics will make the spike in deaths from respiratory infections pretty obvious.
Caveats: I’ve included references for all the numbers, but I don’t have any expertise in this field so don’t know how accurate the numbers are or if I am interpreting correctly. These look pretty straightforward but there’s definite possibility that there are some important qualifications to this data that I don’t know that I don’t know.