In Australia, we have (very roughly) 6,000 public hospital beds available on any given day We have ~65,000 beds total, but many of these are in use most of the time (mean ~90% capacity)
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Now, not all of these beds are available every day, and not all of them are suitable for
#COVID19 patients But let's assume they are for the sake of argumentShow this thread -
A "bed-day" is a term describing the use of a hospital inpatient bed for 24 hours If we have 6,000 beds, we have 6,000 bed-days each day, or 42,000 a week
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The median
#COVID19 length of stay in hospital is hard to accurately assess right now, but appears to be somewhere around 7 days so we'll use thatShow this thread -
Now here is the BIG CAVEAT ALL OF THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL. WE DO NOT KNOW ENOUGH FOR ANYTHING TO BE CERTAIN. DO NOT TAKE THIS AS A PREDICTION OF ANY KIND
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Ok, so that's out of the way, Australia has ~24 million people A very rough guess is that in total around 10% of the population will be infected (again NOT A PREDICTION)
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We know that somewhere around 5% of people who are infected get hospitalized If that's true, then our estimate is 24,000,000 (people)*0.1 (infected) 0.05 (hospital rate)*7 (bed-days per hospitalization) = 840,000 bed-days that are needed
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Now, if the epidemic lasts 10 weeks, that's an average of 840,000/(7*10) = 12,000 beds needed per day Remember, our capacity is ~6,000 That is perhaps doable, but not great
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If the epidemic lasts for 22 weeks, however, the average drops to 840,000/(7*22) = 5,450 That's within our capacity! Much better
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Now, this calculation hides the truth, because in fact most of those hospitalizations during the epidemic will be during the "peak", which means there will likely be a period where the hospitals are over capacity regardless of what we do
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However, it gives you some idea of why we want to slow the epidemic down as much as possible
#FlattenTheCurvepic.twitter.com/iv1vQEpT4PShow this thread -
And, finally, remember that NONE OF THESE NUMBERS ARE TRUE/PREDICTIONS THESE ARE JUST VERY ROUGH GUESSES TO ILLUSTRATE A POINT fin
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