The Sober Math

[gardenmom5]

while people are starting to understand - I'm still seeing way too many who just dont' get it.  I've seen people making contemptuous comments about lockdowns.   (and praising comments for places where it is still business as usual.)

I received this, and thought I'd go ahead and pass it on.  Written by Jason Warner.

it's long - maybe 20 minutes to read. 

many patients (5%) with the virus need ICU beds, not just any old hospital bed. Only about 10% of hospital beds are considered intensive care beds. So we will have a huge bed shortage, but that is not the biggest problem, as we can erect temporary ICU shelters and bring in more temporary beds, as Italy has already done, and California and Washington hospitals have already done. Evergreen Hospital in Seattle has already erected temporary triage tents in the parking lot as of 3/13/20. All regular beds are full at Evergreen Hospital as of yesterday.  (me: the most deaths have occurred at Evergreen - they're two miles from the nursing home.  I had three of my babies at Evergreen.)

But hospital beds are not the big problem. The lack of ventilators is the big problem.     (me: Italy had broken ventilators that were worthless, and the couldn't get the replacement parts.  desperation is the father of invention, and someone was able to use a 3D printer to make replacement valves so they didn't lose ventilators they desperately needed.)  

Extreme social distancing is the only response available to stop the virus today.

 

[gardenmom5]

there is this chart for each state, estimated rate of spread without distancing measures, number of hospital beds and days until those beds are full.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DlC5kh9ve-Giv96XTnhCiB6vQAkQCjl5bDSjT68Q0FY/edit#gid=1703861074

 

 

[Pawz4me]

It's not just lack of beds and ventilators. It's lack of respiratory therapists to monitor the ventilators, too. It's not a set-it-and-forget-it thing. They take constant monitoring.

[Happy2BaMom]

Excellent article/points. People don’t grasp the exponential math of infection. 
They also don’t seem to grasp the math around differences in death rates (or, using your example, in serious infections that require hospitalizations). These two factors, especially when combined, make all the difference in the world. 

I remind people that the flu has a death rate of 0.1% (on average). H1N1 in the US had a death rate of roughly 0.2% (based on CDC statistics) during that epidemic. 

While the death rate from Covid is hard to get a good handle on, given the enormous variability among countries, established rates so far have been from a low of 1.2% (still 6 times higher than H1N1) in South Korea to as high as 4% in China to the astronomical 7+% (38 times higher than H1N1) poor Italy is experiencing*. Covid is also MUCH more infectious, for a longer time period  

*Italy Death rate calculated from today's figures...2,158 deaths out of 27,980 confirmed cases, although these numbers seem to change by the hour. I also recognize that there are undoubtedly many unconfirmed cases of Covid, so the true death rate (if we knew about those cases) would be much lower.  
Washington’s death rate in confirmed cases is running around 5% (altho, again, we don’t know about unconfirmed cases). 
 

In short, a largely math-illiterate populace is doing what it will tend to do...not get it. 
 

(ETA: I have no idea why my text is different sizes...I didn’t mean for it to be)

Edited March 17, 2020 by Happy2BaMom

[cintinative]

This website is not loading at the moment but you can put in your city name and it will tell you the available beds at the hospital, etc.

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/covid-hospitals?fbclid=IwAR0_SS97lUGLVPOrdhoK6yZTG6wFQIecoJ6idBr0L-W3fXbZZBvkJeDExvw

[Arctic Bunny]

7 hours ago, gardenmom5 said:

there is this chart for each state, estimated rate of spread without distancing measures, number of hospital beds and days until those beds are full.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DlC5kh9ve-Giv96XTnhCiB6vQAkQCjl5bDSjT68Q0FY/edit#gid=1703861074

 

 

So I just found our numbers... On February 29 one of our hospitals was at 96% beds occupied, the other was 86%. On February 27, one was at 84%, the other at 107%.  With 639 beds between the two, I don’t feel like we have a lot of wiggle room.

[gardenmom5]

20 minutes ago, arctic_bunny said:

So I just found our numbers... On February 29 one of our hospitals was at 96% beds occupied, the other was 86%. On February 27, one was at 84%, the other at 107%.  With 639 beds between the two, I don’t feel like we have a lot of wiggle room.

hospitals generally know the average number of beds they'll need in a season, and that's about how many they have.  when I went in in janaury, on droplet protocols - they had to figure out where they could put me and find an available bed.  I was moved to another room the next day.  still on droplet protocols.   with me, they were being cautious as they didn't know what I had (just bacterial pneumonia - not really contagious.) so they were being very cautious.  but that was at the exact same time US case zero was hospitalized less than an hour north of me.   I'm sure things are far worse now.  

(WA has had 54 deaths so far.)