Indications for healthcare surge capacity in European countries facing an exponential increase in COVID19 cases

Frederik Verelst; Elise J. Kuylen; Philippe Beutels

We retrieve the number of active reported cases and the cumulative number of COVID-19 related deaths over the past 21 days in real-time [9] and calculate the proportion per hospital bed, physician, the composite measures, and healthcare expenditures, respectively. We calculated, for each country, 16 ratios by dividing the number of cumulative deaths, and active reported cases, by each measure for both approaches. Afterwards, we normalized ratios by capacity measure benchmarks for Italy, which is defined as the cumulative number of COVID-19 related deaths (intensity-approach) or active cases (magnitude-approach) on March 11, divided by capacity measures that were derived for Italy. As such, when a country scores 1 on a specific measure, this reads as: "currently similar pressure as in Italy on March 11" for this specific measure. Since the results of these measures are very time-sensitive, we constructed a website that tracks healthcare pressure in real-time: www.covid-hcpressure.org . CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.