The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
What data was used to create the models?
Unless the spread of coronavirus can be kept from spiking, hospitals in the greater Philadelphia and greater Reading regions do not have enough beds to handle the influx of patients, according to a database created by the nonprofit news service ProPublica.
Health professionals have been stressing the importance of measures to prevent infectious disease from spreading too quickly.
Those measures include frequent hand-washing, resist touching your face; staying out of crowded places; maintaining a “social distance” of about six feet from others and staying home if you feel ill.
The phrase “flatten the curve” is being used to help people understand the need to spread the influx of new cases over a longer period of time to prevent medical resources from being overwhelmed with patients arriving all at once.
A search of the ProPublica database puts some sobering the numbers to that scenario for the region.
To understand how hospital capacity could vary region to region during the pandemic, ProPublica used data that was modeled by Dr. Ashish Jha and his team of researchers from the Harvard Global Health Institute.
For the analysis, Jha and his team looked at various scenarios, in which 20 percent, 40 percent and 60 percent of the adult population would be infected with the virus, many of whom would have no or few symptoms.
They then examined whether hospitals had the capacity to handle those three scenarios if the cases came in over six months, 12 months and 18 months.
Hospital bed figures were derived from recent surveys conducted by the American Hospital Association and data compiled by the American Hospital Directory. The researchers divided the country into slightly more than 300 regions, also known as hospital referral regions, a technique that is common in health policy research.
In most scenarios, “vast communities in America are not prepared to take care of the COVID-19 patients showing up,” Jha told ProPublica.
Under the researchers’ best-case scenario, Americans act quickly to slow the spread of the virus through social distancing, and the infection rate among adults remains relatively low at 20 percent, or 49.4 million people over the age of 18.
That’s less than twice the number of people who get the flu each year.
But even under that scenario, hospitals in the eastern Pennsylvania region would not have enough beds to handle the most severe cases unless they can be spread out over a longer period of time, such as 12 or 18 months, the data shows.
Many of the hospitals in Chester, western Montgomery and Berks counties are owned by West Readingbased Tower Health.
Responding to MediaNews Group’s first request
LANSDALE-NORTH WALES for comment and input for this article, Tower Health spokesperson Jessica Bezler provided this sentence as the company’s response: “Tower Health is assessing bed count hourly to ensure the safety of our patients.”
Dr. Bob A. Czincila, the medical director of emergency medicine at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery, provided a little more insight in his response to the same data set in an article published Wednesday by Patch.
“The most important thing that we can do is to lower the curve, so we don’t have that giant increase in cases; so we don’t have people suffering; So we don’t have a run of those cases where we don’t have beds to take care of them,” Czincilla said.
He told Patch, deterring unnecessary visits to the hospital is crucial.
“If they can sequester, we might be able to get a handle on it, and get to the point where we can avoid the scenario of being inundated with an overwhelming number,” he said.
But there are many ways for that unpleasant scenario to unfold if we are not vigilant.
Berks and western Montgomery counties
As of 2018, ProPublica’s figures show the greater Reading region, which includes all of Berks County and western Montgomery County, had 1,330 total hospital beds, including Pottstown Hospital.
Of those beds, about 57 percent are occupied at any given time, potentially leaving only 560 beds open for additional patients. The bed count includes 99 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 greater Reading region has a population of about 600,000 residents; 17 percent 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 percent of the adult population contracts the disease over 12 months, the Reading region would be among the regions that would not have enough beds and would need to expand capacity, ProPublica reported.
It is estimated that about 8 percent of the adult population would require hospital care. In a moderate scenario where 40 percent of the population is infected over a 12-month period, hospitals in the Reading region would receive an estimated 39,300 coronavirus patients.
The influx of patients would require 1,310 beds over 12 months, which is 2.3 times the 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 Reading region, intensive care units would be especially overwhelmed and require additional capacity.
Without coronavirus patients, there are only 50 available beds on average in intensive care units, which is 5.7 times less than what is needed to care for all severe cases envisioned in the scenario.
Hospitals further east
The ProPublica database counts areas further east, in eastern Montgomery and Chester counties, including Phoenixville Hospital, as well as all of Delaware County, as part of the greater Philadelphia region.
Here is how those numbers shake out:
The Philadelphia region has a population of about 4.3 million residents; 15 percent 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 percent of the adult population contracts the disease over 12 months, the Philadelphia region would be among the regions that would need to expand capacity.
It is estimated that about 8 percent of the infected adult population would require hospital care. In a moderate scenario where 40 percent of the population is infected over a 12-month period, hospitals in the greater Philadelphia region would receive an estimated 277,000 coronavirus patients.
The influx of patients would require 9,240 beds over 12 months, which is 2.5 times the available beds in that time period.
In the Philadelphia, region, intensive care units would be especially overwhelmed and require additional capacity.
Without coronavirus patients, there are only 550 available beds on average in intensive care units in the greater Philadelphia region, which is 3.6 times less than what is needed to care for all severe cases.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power and major issues and shares its reporting with other news operations.