Coronavirus: Only one hospital bed for every six 'seriously ill' US patients in event of rapid surge, report says

'Unless we are able to implement dramatic isolation measures like some places in China, we’ll be presented with overwhelming numbers of coronavirus patients – two to 10 times as we see at peak influenza times'

An extreme shortage of hospital beds. A dearth of critical medical supplies, like ventilators and face masks. In a rapid surge of coronavirus cases spanning the United States, new reports warn states and hospitals throughout the country are unprepared to deal with an onslaught of seriously ill patients.

As the death toll for the Wuhan coronavirus surpasses 40 in the US and states declare emergencies over alarming new outbreaks of them mysterious illness, a conservative analysis of America’s hospitals estimated just one bed for nearly six seriously ill patients in the event of nationwide surge of cases.

The analysis, conducted by USA Today and published in a report on Friday that cited research from the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security and figures from the American Hospital Association, estimated 23.8 million Americans may contract COVID-19.

Experts then predicted that a shortage of beds would occur in numerous states if the US failed in its efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and if the virus were to spread in a similar way that it is has in other heavily-impacted countries, like Italy.

“Unless we are able to implement dramatic isolation measures like some places in China, we’ll be presented with overwhelming numbers of coronavirus patients – two to 10 times as we see at peak influenza times,” Dr James Lawler, a researcher at the University of Nebraska’s Medical Centre and the Global Centre for Health Security, told USA Today.

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He added: “No hospital has current capacity to absorb that.”

The analysis was conservative in that it assumed all of the more than 790,000 staffed hospital beds in US hospitals were empty. Less conservatives estimates are even more harrowing, predicting nearly 17 patients for every available bed.

Since the infection rate for the Wuhan coronavirus remains unknown, USA Today used a comparative analysis with a mild flu season and estimated nearly 6.1 percent of patients would face critical symptoms, while another 13.8 percent would face severe symptoms, all of whom would require hospitalisation.

Some experts have said the country’s health care industry was not designed to deal with such a phenomenon.

Dr Matthew Wynia, director of the Centre for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, told Business Insider: “The incentives of the healthcare system are antithetical to building and maintaining surge capacity.”

He also told the news outlet a surge in confirmed coronavirus cases could also lead to a shortfall of medical supplies like ventilators, as well as the staff required to properly use such devices.

“You need people to run the ventilators”, he said.

Though the majority of coronavirus cases typically feature mild, flu-like symptoms, the most critical infections sometimes feature deadly complications like septic shock, respiratory failure and organ failure and more.

State officials have said they are working to slow the spread of the virus as much as possible, while instituting new guidelines for patients with confirmed cases to recover from their symptoms at home in isolation.

Dr Colleen Krat, who heads the Clinical Virology Research Laboratory at Emory University School of Medicine, told USA Today not all patients who contract COVID-19 may require hospitalisation.

“If people have to be quarantined or have to be isolated, we're finding that healthcare’s being used as sort of safety net for that,” she said. “And that's not going to work if we have really sick people that need help.”