Covid Side Thought

For hospitalizations, since overall capacity affects care (and covid can be misdiagnosed) I wish the hospitalization data showed total beds available (not sure if that's beds that have staffing on hand to support, so there may also be other metrics) - total available, ave use, current use, and how many beds are covid. (as raw numbers and percentages). 

I saw something like that on NPR, but it didn't appear to be a regularly updated repor and was primarily focused on how many beds were covid. 

Which, okay. Large numbers of covid cases do strain hospitals even if they have beds available. Iirc the NPR article listed what percentage of covid cases indicated strain and offered a color coded map based off of that. 

It's just that I came to realize it wasn't very useful to me. 

If a community has multiple hospitals and decides to let one focus on covid while the others don't, and if that hospital serves more than just the county (the data was at the county level) I wasn't sure it was the best indicator. One county might have 15% covid cases and be colored as stressed, but it still was at 67% overall bed use. 

Plus hospitals will convert wards and cram beds into wherever they can when needed. They really do try their hardest to take care of patients, and that means there's some amount of slack (though needing to go so far is definitely a sign of a stressed system, even if they do find a way).

I thought total bed usage could point out where someone is under reporting covid (people still get sick, so probably more cases of pneumonia, regular flu, etc. If the covid percentage was low but overall bed usage high - like some hospitals that weren't color coded as stressed because they didn't have a lot of covid cases, but had 98% of their beds in use - far more than the norm), but with all of the above it's definitely not easy. 

I eventually decided I didn't have the knowledge or the raw data to do that sort of analysis.