Giles Corey wrote:
800,000 Americans hospitalized with the flu each year.
No stories of hospitals being overwhelmed.
Covid -- hard to get a hard number but surely no more than 20k to 30k hospitalized in Amercia so far.
All sorts of stories of hospitals being overwhelmed.
The number is closer to 400,000 being hospitalized each year. 800,000 is the extreme end of the range not often seen.
This season, there were 310,000 hospitalizations as of 3/5.
Now, flu season is Oct 1 - Mar 31, but a only a small percentage of cases occur in Oct & Nov. But nevertheless, flu season is a fairly consistent wave that is understood and planned for. Generally, the average flu stay is 4.3 days.
So, let’s do some math. Of the 400,000 flu cases, 90% occur across Dec to Mar. That’s 360,000 hospitalizations in 120 days. That’s 3,000 per day. So for example, last week, the flu would have created the need for (21,000 x 4.3) 90,300 days of hospitalized care across the country.
The average Covid 19 stay is about twice that (8.0). There were (estimated) 25,000 Covid hospitalizations last week, generating the need 160,000 days of hospitalized care.
So, not only is Covid acutely more taxing than the flu, that’s just half the story. The other half of the story is that flu hospitalizations still exist. So, these aren’t cases generated in a vacuum, these people are going to hospitals that already have beds taken by the flu.
So, in summary, last week alone would there was a more than 2x need to support respiratory patients and this upcoming week looks like it might be 5x or more if the growth continues. Hospitals don’t have exponentially large staffs.