With Coronavirus cases soaring across the country, and the vaccine still several months away from being widely distributed in the United States, the medical community is scrambling. ICUs across the country are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, a sign that we are just starting to hit the widely warned about Thanksgiving surge.
“Tracking daily hospitalization data is a major step forward in quantifying the current impact on local hospital systems modeling and forecasting future utilization needs, and tracking the rate of change in the disease severity”, says the University of Minnesota who developed the COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project.
The tool tracks how many beds are filled with COVID-19 patients, with an individual per hospital number, as well as an average count for each count. The experts told NPR that “the ratio of COVID-19 hospitalizations to total beds gives a picture of how much strain a hospital is under. Though there’s not a clear threshold, it’s concerning when that rate rises above 10%.” Anything above 20% is considered “extreme stress” on a hospital.
To see where your county and/or hospital stand, enter your county name on the dropdown bar. Every hospital reporting numbers will appear there, and longside it, each will list not just a percentage, but actual numbers to help the public see how overwhelmed each hospital is.
You can check the tool here.