Hospitals in Washington state could exceed their intensive care bed capacity as early as next week, according to projections from a Seattle-based research center.
New modeling from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluationat the University of Washington projects about a monthlong stretch where demand for ICU beds exceeds the supply. That could begin as soon as April 2. The epidemic is projected to peak on April 19.
By the end of summer, the modeling suggests some 1,429 people could die of COVID-19, though that number comes with a range of uncertainty. It could be as low as 312 and as high as 2,710.
The state’s capacity crunch could be less severe than many other states. IHME Director Christopher Murray says that may be because Washington is making progress in “flattening the curve.”
“Because we seem to have a slower growing epidemic, and that might be because of early behavioral change, the trajectory of the epidemic here is on a slower curve than New York or Georgia or Louisiana, where they’re shooting up,” Murray said. “They're going to be way over capacity, multiples over ICU capacity. Much worse, at least in the current trajectory, than we will be.”
The model assumes stringent social distancing measures stay in place for the foreseeable future.
“The trajectory of the pandemic will change – and dramatically for the worse – if people ease up on social distancing or relax with other precautions. We encourage everyone to adhere to those precautions to help save lives.”
The IHME analysis projects 81,114 deaths nationwide by summer, though that number could range as low as 38,242 and as high as 162,106.
Any of those mortality figures would be significantly lower than an earlier, widely circulated model from British researchers at Imperial College, which found a million or more Americans could die. IHME’s Murray says his modeling works a bit differently.
It stipulates that stringent social distancing stays in place, and it plugs in some real-world data, including death rates, that the Imperial College study did not.
But crucially, the British study assumed projected a large second wave of infections in the fall under many scenarios. The IHME modeling does not account for that.
Murray says we simply don’t know enough about COVID-19 to make that assumption.
“If you go back to SARS-1, we also at the time had models that told us there would be a huge second wave because in the first wave, only a very small fraction got infected. The second wave never came, and we never really knew why,” he said. “Now, that's no reason to be complacent. It just says the future is hard to be sure about, so protecting from future reinfection will be a very big issue and that will be a lot of where the effort will need to go.”
