If a hospitalization is required for severe cases, it is likely the patient will require hospitalization for at least 1 week—unless they die sooner.
Just look at the number of infected every 3 days, it’s almost double in new outbreaks.
Also, it’s not like all the beds are made available just for Cov patients. On any given day, the typical ICU is 2/3 full and the ER has a wait time of about 2.5 hours—unless you’re about to die.
The hope is no one in the 20% hospitalization group gets pneumonia complications. Even if you fully recover from Cov-related pneumonia, you’ll end up with scarring in your lungs.
This is an article about the situation in northern Italy. It speaks to a medical system overwhelmed and close to collapse to the number of severely ill cases, particularly those needing intensive care.
For context, according to BBC today (
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51793619), the current numbers in Italy are:
The number of people to have died from the coronavirus in Italy has shot up by 133 in a day to 366, officials say.
The total number of infections leapt 25% to 7,375 from 5,883, according to the Civil Protection agency.
The article below is in Italian, so the below snippets are from Google's translation.
https://www.corriere.it/cronache/20...oi-cb01190a-60be-11ea-8d61-438e0a276fc4.shtml
QUOTE SNIPPETS
Coronavirus: «We are also creating intensive therapies in the corridors»
The alarm of the coordinator of the crisis unit of the Lombardy Region Antonio Pesenti: «On March 26th in Lombardy we will have 18,000 sick, 3,000 will need respiratory assistance»
«By now we are forced to create intensive therapies in the corridor, in the operating rooms, in the recovery rooms. We gutted entire hospital wards to make room for the seriously ill. One of the best healthcare in the world, the Lombard one, is one step away from collapse ».
Antonio Pesenti , 68, is the coordinator of the Lombardy Region Crisis Unit for intensive care. Publicly praised by the scientist Alberto Mantovani as one of the best Italian men of science, he is a physician-resuscitator with strong nerves, accustomed to governing any type of emergency. But at nine o'clock on Saturday evening, after 17 days of non-stop work, his voice is broken by tiredness and worry: "If the population does not understand that they must stay at home, the situation will become catastrophic ».
She, together with her colleagues in the reanimations, is the author of a very harsh letter to the government of Giuseppe Conte: "The scientific projections are very alarming". What do you mean by that?
«The picture is of such gravity as to require an increase in resuscitation places up to ten times the current availability. The number of hospitalized patients expected on March 26 is 18 thousand Lombard patients, of which between 2,700 and 3,200 will require hospitalization in intensive care. Today there are already over a thousand patients between those in resuscitation and those who risk getting worse from one minute to the next. We monitor the situation 24 hours a day ».
...
END
The article also speaks to why it isn't easy to transfer the patients to other parts of the country for are.
One assumes this overburdening is one of the primary drivers behind the mass quarantine Italy has imposed: the need to contain it as much as possible, or at least seriously slow it down.
I think Italy will be an important bellwether for what other countries need to prepare for.
The mass quarantine strategy Italy is implementing and the milder strategies other jurisdictions are using will be interesting to see how much benefit they confer, and in turn what consequences that may have for US theme parks as US authorities at various levels consider the strategies they will implement as things progress.
