This thread was created on 3/8/2020, or approximately one million years ago in virus time. It’s getting pretty bloated now, and a lot of things that were high value at the time have been eclipsed by events, making karma not a very useful sorting tool. So I’m declaring this thread finished, and asking everyone to move over to the April Coronavirus Open Thread.
Interested in what happened in this thread? Here’s the timeless or not-yet-eclipsed highlights:
Scott Alexander comes up with Hammer and Dance 6 days before Tomas Pueyo
Spiracular on why SARS-Cov-2 is unlikely to be lab-created.
Twodocuments collating estimates of basic epidemiological parameters, in response to this thread
Discussion on whether the tuberculosis vaccine provides protection against COVID-19.
This preprint from Marc Lipsitch and colleagues is relevant,
Li R, Rivers C, Tan Q, Murray MB, Toner E, Lipsitch M. 2020. The Demand for Inpatient and ICU Beds for COVID-19 in the US: Lessons From Chinese Cities. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42599304
See their Figure 1 where they plot the hospitalization rate during the Wuhan epidemic against US hospital bed capacity to give an idea of how quickly the US would be overloaded in a "Wuhan-like outbreak". They consider ICU beds (2.8 per 10000 adults), empty ICU beds (31.8% of all ICU beds), and what they call "US inpatient beds in community hospitals" (29.7 per 10000 adults). The sum of ICU and community beds comes out to ~850000 based on an adult US population of 240 million, which isn't too far off from your 924107 number.
Two things to keep in mind for working through your question about the implications of 10^6 (concurrent) cases (I see these are reiterating points Mark already made): On the one hand, most symptomatic cases will not need hospitalization. On the other hand, most hospital beds are occupied (~70% of ICU beds, which roughly agrees with Mark's 66% estimate for overall beds), so the number of available beds is much less than the total number of staffed beds.
I've heard it suggested that today's declared national state of emergency and associated funding may enable things like FEMA building field hospitals to extend hospital bed capacity.
This thread was created on 3/8/2020, or approximately one million years ago in virus time. It’s getting pretty bloated now, and a lot of things that were high value at the time have been eclipsed by events, making karma not a very useful sorting tool. So I’m declaring this thread finished, and asking everyone to move over to the April Coronavirus Open Thread.
Interested in what happened in this thread? Here’s the timeless or not-yet-eclipsed highlights: