Thread by @TrackingCovid

Hospital Capacity:

Most of the media coverage on hospitals has been focused on beds. Beds are not the resource limitation, clinicians are. And beds are used as the best proxy for hospital capacity. Typical utilization rates depend on the hospital but vary between 65% and 90%

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In April, Vanderbilt created a predictive model to advise the State on what restrictions and NPI’s such as social distancing (notice that masks were not an input into the model) to implement in order to avert certain disaster, without which we would see 50,000 hospitalizations
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Take a look at the Vanderbilt projections and then compare them with the actual Hospitalizations in the Visual. Clearly, there was a time when we believed we needed to “flatten the curve” and participate in these measures to save lives.

tennessean.com/story/news/hea…

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As time goes on, it becomes clearer that the hospital capacity disaster that was predicted never came to pass, and never will, even with recent increases during the winter respiratory virus season.

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No surge facility that we rushed to build-out, including the 1600 beds in the Music City Center were ever used. Considering that clinicians are the finite resource to provide care, what were we ever going to do with those beds?

wpln.org/post/tennessee…

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Furthermore, when hospitals suspended elective procedures in the Spring/Summer- they had to furlough and layoff staff. Observing employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this reduction in staffing has still not fully recovered.

beckershospitalreview.com/finance/49-hos…
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When newspaper articles cite “hospital capacity” issues, they are not citing beds. They cite staffing shortages. Why could this be? When schools are closed for in-person- someone needs to stay home to help and take care of them.

newschannel5.com/news/newschann…

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We have seen 865,000 women leave the workforce nationally as of October. What happens when medical professionals leave the workforce to attend to their children for remote school? Staffing shortages.

nytimes.com/2020/10/03/us/…

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This is a vicious cycle that our political, education, and healthcare leaders need to find their way out of. It's time they start seeing that they are creating the problem, not solving it.

Closed schools mean stressed hospital staff.

#openschools

/END