Social and Spatial Epidemiology Unit members Charles Branas and Andrew Rundle, along with colleagues from Patient Insight, the Mount Sinai Health System and MIT, have created estimates of the number of hospital critical care beds, including ICU beds and other hospital beds used for critical care purposes, that could be made available by hospitals in response to patient surges. Three scenarios of intensity of hospital response were created, taking into account existing ICU bed availability, currently occupied ICU beds that can be made available, other beds such as post-anesthesia care unit bed, operating room beds, and step-down beds that could be converted to critical care beds for COVID-19 patients and the possibility of having two patients use one ventilator in ICU. All civilian acute medical-surgical tertiary care hospitals and long-term acute care hospitals for which data were available in the US are included.
The data are mapped on the Built Environment and Health Research Group’s online interactive COVID-19 mapping tool. The documentation of their methods is here.
Screen shot of the BEH COVID-19 mapping tool showing the distribution of COVID-19 cases (blue) and estimated available ICU beds under a Moderate Intensity Response to patient surges
