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A study suggests that existing critical care capacity in the United States may be insufficient to meet the demand created by COVID-19. Community transmission of COVID-19 in the United States is expected to dramatically increase demand for critical care facilities. Using a model of COVID-19 transmission that incorporates US population demographics, Alison Galvani, Burton Singer, and colleagues projected future COVID-19-associated demand for intensive care unit (ICU) beds in the United States. Assuming a basic reproduction number\u00a0R<\/em>0<\/sub>\u00a0of 2.5, the authors projected that in the absence of self-isolation, treating all critically ill cases at the height of the outbreak would require nearly 300,000 ICU beds, or three times the number of existing ICU beds in the country. For a lower\u00a0R<\/em>0<\/sub>\u00a0of 2, approximately 150,000 ICU beds would be required in the absence of self-isolation\u20141.5 times the existing number of ICU beds. Self-isolation of 20% of cases within 24 hours of symptom onset would reduce peak weekly demand for ICU beds by nearly 50% for an\u00a0R<\/em>0<\/sub>\u00a0of 2.5 and by nearly 75% for an\u00a0R<\/em>0<\/sub>\u00a0of 2, although demand would still exceed existing capacity in the former scenario. The results suggest that COVID-19 will likely overwhelm the country\u2019s existing critical care capacity and that policies to expand ICU capacity and encourage self-isolation are urgently needed, according to the authors. <\/p> Article #20-04064: \u201cProjecting hospital utilization during the COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States,\u201d by Seyed M. Moghadas et al.<\/em><\/a> <\/p> <\/p> Photo by\u00a0Ashkan Forouzani<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0Unsplash<\/a> <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A study suggests that existing critical care capacity in the United States may be insufficient to meet the demand created by COVID-19. Community transmission of COVID-19 in the United States is expected to dramatically increase demand for critical care facilities. Using a model of COVID-19 transmission that incorporates US population demographics, Alison Galvani, Burton Singer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2620,"featured_media":23365,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"twitterCardType":"","cardImageID":0,"cardImage":"","cardTitle":"","cardDesc":"","cardImageAlt":"","cardPlayer":"","cardPlayerWidth":0,"cardPlayerHeight":0,"cardPlayerStream":"","cardPlayerCodec":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sin-categoria-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2620"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23363"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23366,"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23363\/revisions\/23366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.infobioquimica.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}