Coronavirus Projected To Overwhelm DC Hospitals: ProPublica Study

The D.C. Department of Health reported Tuesday night that nine more people have tested positive for the new coronavirus, bringing the District’s total number to 31 positive cases.

To date, the D.C. Public Health Laboratory and outside facilities have tested 170 people overall, returning 138 negative results with one test still pending. What these numbers suggest is a steady increase in the number of people testing positive for the virus.

D.C. officials have taken a number of measures to stem the spread of the respiratory disease COVID-19.

On March 11, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a state of emergency and a public health emergency. On Monday, she ordered all bars and restaurants to end table seating and banned indoor dining until April 1. In addition, the D.C. Council approved emergency coronavirus legislation Tuesday to help ease the impact of the disease on the District’s residents and businesses.

Despite these measures, the number of people contracting COVID-19 is expected to rise in our area, and the District is projected to run out of hospital beds for patients if the number of infected people rises by even a few hundred.

The warning about the potential for overwhelmed hospitals comes from an analysis by Harvard Global Health Institute and ProPublica.

One of the ideas D.C. officials considered to address this problem was reopening the shuttered Providence Hospital in Northeast, but Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee, president and CEO of Providence Health System, told the Washington Post the hospital was not suitable for residential or inpatient care.

From ProPublica:

As of 2018, Washington, D.C. had 5,060 total hospital beds, of which about 68 percent were occupied, potentially leaving only 1,600 beds open for additional patients. The bed count includes 600 beds in intensive care units, according to data from the American Hospital Association and the American Hospital Directory. Intensive care units are best equipped to handle the most acute coronavirus cases.

The Washington, D.C. region has a population of about 2.8 million residents; 14% are over the age of 65. The experience in other countries has shown that elderly patients have significantly higher hospitalization and fatality rates from the coronavirus.

In the moderate scenario, in which 40% of the adult population contracts the disease over 12 months, Washington, D.C. would be among the regions that would need to expand capacity.
It is estimated that about 8% of the adult population would require hospital care. In a moderate scenario where 40% of the population is infected over a 12-month period, hospitals in

Washington, D.C. would receive an estimated 180,000 coronavirus patients. The influx of patients would require 6,000 beds over 12 months, which is 3.8 times times the number of available beds in that time period. The Harvard researchers’ scenarios assume that each coronavirus patient will require 12 days of hospital care on average, based on data from China.

In the Washington, D.C. region, intensive care units would be especially overwhelmed and require additional capacity. Without coronavirus patients, there are only 220 available beds on average in intensive care units, which is 5.9 times times less than what is needed to care for all severe cases.

ProPublica, a Patch Partner, is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power and other public concerns. Click here to see ProPublica’s full story and specifics about hospitals in your area.

 

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