The COVID-19 pandemic

[Bytor]

I have read estimates that COVID-19 could make 30% to 70% of the population sick.  That's a scary number.  
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Will the hospitals be overwhelmed?

4) Only of that 30-70% comes true.

Even if only 10%.


There are about 73,000 hospital beds in Canada. 13% are filled by people who should be in a different facility, like long term care, but cannot be move because there is no room. I can't find the utilised capacity, but in the USA it's something like over all 70% in use at any given time, but I suspect we're higher because of that 13% so say 85% utilisation up here. So ~11k free beds at at any one time

If the infection rate is the lower 35% being talked about, that's still ~12.3M people. If 3.4% is the overall death rate, that's ~417k deaths. All of those people would be needing acute hospital care before they die. If Italy's numbers are diagnostic, then 10% of people who catch coronavirus need hospitalisation and the 3.4% who die are part of that. So it's really 1.23M people who will require an acute care bed.

If it drags on for 4 months (18 weeks) and those serious cases need a bed for 2 weeks before they recover (or die), we're still at 12x more people needing acute care than we have beds.

At a year long it's still ~4x too many sick people for the beds we have.

Of course, that assumes people getting sick at a steady rate, which is unlikely to happen.

Redo with 10% getting infected, that's still ~350k needing hospitalisation. Spread over a 4 month/18 week period that's still ~39k needing an acute care bed, or 3.6 sick people per available bed.