quote:
Hospital beds is not a very valuable statistic because it’s not a fixed resource. Hospitals can remove elective procedures or transfer them to other facilities, can add surge capacity, and/or can go above surge capacity by reformatting non-ICU beds into ICU beds. Hospitals try to maximize ICU usage during the best of times from a fiscal perspective, so % utilized at any given time is not informative without a lot of context.

Don’t know about the others, but Baylor in Harris County is not really close to nominal capacity.

Got it. Is there a meaningful stat that tracks what we would care about in this regard - i.e. hospitals actually getting over-burdened?

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Posted by Jwho77

cyperspace

Member since Sep 2003

76806 posts

Posted on 7/1/20 at 9:32 pm to Big Scrub TX

quote:
Is there a meaningful stat that tracks what we would care about in this regard - i.e. hospitals actually getting over-burdened?

No, because that concern has been dead for months.

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Posted by Athanatos

Baton Rouge

Member since Sep 2010

8143 posts

Posted on 7/2/20 at 3:10 pm to Big Scrub TX

quote:
Got it. Is there a meaningful stat that tracks what we would care about in this regard - i.e. hospitals actually getting over-burdened?

As COVID hospitalizations rise (especially COVID ICU usage), that should prompt us to ask those systems for more information on the nature of that usage and whether there is a current crisis. Basically, it’s a flashing light to let us know to get more info. There’s no perfect data point that would let us know the ground situation at every hospital.

Instead, I’ve seen Texas journalists use the same data to extrapolate an apocalyptic nightmare, but they are suffering from the fatal conceit. The world is messy, and COVID data is messier. You can’t know everything that’s going on, and data will never give you the full picture.

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