Modelling strategies to predict hospital demand during the COVID-19 outbreak in Bogotá, Colombia

Claudia Rivera-Rodriguez; Beatriz Piedad Urdinola

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic has spread from China to almost all countries in the world by April 1st 2020. It arrived to Colombia on March 6, 2020 from an imported case and evolved to local cases of transmission. In order to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak 10 in Bogotá, the largest city in Colombia, a local lock-down was introduced on March 15, 2020, followed by a national lock-down on March 19, 2020. Colombia, like many developing nations, does not have a strong health system able to respond to a pandemic of the magnitude of the present one. Neither in terms of infrastructure, medical personnel nor in terms of logistic preparedness or 15 technical capacities to arrange all medical needed resources. The latter is the main motivation to create a model that allows particular clinics and hospitals to estimate the number of beds in the respirators needed to attend during the peak days. Specifically, we are interested in estimating the number of patients that require Intensive Care Units-ICU care (critical), and the number of patients 20 that require hospital care (severe), but not ICU care.