Forecasting COVID-19 impact on hospital bed-days, ICU-days, ventilator-days and deaths by US state in the next 4 months

IHME COVID-19 health service utilization forecasting team, Christopher JL Murray. MedRxiv. March 26. Available at: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.27.20043752v1 (accessed 4/2/20) [CrossRef]

The authors provide a preprint of their forecasting data for the COVID-19 epidemic. Using a statistical model, the authors predict excess demand in the US will be 64,175 (95% UI 7,977 to 251,059) total beds and 17,380 (95% UI 2,432 to 57,955) ICU beds at the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic. Peak ventilator use is predicted to be 19,481 (95% UI 9,767 to 39,674) ventilators. Peak demand will be in the second week of April. The authors estimate 81,114 (95% UI 38,242 to 162,106) deaths in the United States from COVID-19 over the next 4 months. In addition, they show their predictions include all beds, ICU beds, ventilators, deaths per day and total deaths at a separate website https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections for the US and each state. These estimates if accurate may help inform the development and implementation of strategies to deal with the COVID-19 epidemic.