Confronting COVID-19: Surging critical care capacity in Italy

Jose Manuel Rodriguez Llanes; Rafael Castro Delgado; Morten Gram Pedersen; Pedro Arcos Gonzalez; Matteo Meneghini

This has proved to be the case here. From the beginning of this emergency in Italy, the ICU bed capacity was identified as a major bottleneck and strong efforts, commensurate resources and attention have been dedicated to this direction from government, planners, media and academics. These efforts are ongoing. Italy has managed to increase its initial capacity of approximately 5200 ICU beds. Assuming that half of these beds can be exclusively used for COVID-19 patients, around 2600 ICU beds were available at baseline. As of 23 March, 3204 ICU beds were under use for these patients in Italy (17), neatly above baseline capacity under those assumptions. There is evidence that ICU capacity in Lombardy was approximately 720 beds pre crisis (16) while 1183 were used on 23 March (17) . The most difficult situation is described in Lombardy where critical care capacity has reached, according to regional government, its maximum capacity (24). There are better news in other regions which are currently increasing ICU capacity such as Veneto (n=325), Toscana (n=745), Campania (n=490) or Piemonte (n=160). Others did not report. These four Italian regions could be adding approximately 1720 new beds. This number is quite similar to numbers collected by the media, 1850 (25) . Currently, we estimate that the ICU capacity for this emergency is approximately 5000 beds. According to our data and estimates, under a positive scenario, this number should be increased by 76% progressively in the next two weeks if hospitals are to provide good quality of care (15) .