Flattening the curve before it flattens us: hospital critical care capacity limits and mortality from novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) cases in US counties

Charles C Branas; Andrew Rundle; Sen Pei; Wan Yang; Brendan G Carr; Sarah Sims; Alexis Zebrowski; Ronan Doorley; Neil Schluger; James W Quinn; Jeffrey Shaman

A baseline critical care bed availability, in the absence of surge clearances, was established as 30% of existing ICU beds in each county being unoccupied and available. From this baseline, additional critical care bed counts were created for each county in our dataset that included beds that could be made available under four critical care surge response scenarios -very low, low, medium, and high (Table 1) . Broadly, these four scenarios assumed the baseline that 30% of a hospital's critical beds are unoccupied and available, that some currently occupied critical care beds can be cleared, that other specialized non-ICU beds can be redeployed as critical care beds, and, in the high scenario, that two critical care patients can be serviced using a single ventilator. In this way, existing critical care bed availability rates and occupied critical care bed clearance rates for purposes of meeting high-volume patient surges in disasters were incorporated into our estimates.