Thread by @ifihadastick

Nashville Hospital capacity- THREAD

All throughout the winter - Metro Nashville Government's Website: Asafenashville.org, consistently reported single digit % available capacity for ICU beds, and low double digit % capacity for Floor bed. See screenshot from Jan 7th.

1/

Nashville has always only reported % available, and not actual numbers- yet they pull their data from Tennessee's HRTS- the same source that Knox and Shelby use and transparently report from.

@malkusm wrote about this on our site here:

asmartnashville.org/posts/nashvill…

2/

So since August, we have been tracking these numbers manually since Metro doesnt provide time-series or raw numbers.

We even tried to triangulate the total bed capacity from multiple sources and came pretty close when I build my dashboard:

3/

We presented our data to @StacyCase_ who ran a story on this in September. It was difficult to get straight raw numbers and they still never shared as a result of this.

4/

fox17.com/news/digging-o…

Fast forward to the end of the year, and over the last couple months, where I pulled data from HHS.gov that is aggregated from federal reporting requirements from hospitals, so now we can finally answer this question.

5/

According to healthdata.gov/dataset/covid-…

Nashville maintained just over 3100 staffed beds throughout the winter.

6/

Their max inpatients was around Dec 11 at around 2250 (single days could have seen higher) which amounted to about 72% of overall capacity.

That's 28% overhead.

On Dec 11th, asafenashville.org was reporting just 12%.

7/

For ICU Capacity, Nashville maintained ~596 Staffed ICU beds throughout winter.

Covid peaked at ~170 patients, ~28% of those beds.

Total inpatient peak at highest was 424, leaving ~29% staffed ICU capacity overhead.

@MetroNashville was reporting merely 4-10% availability

8/

Why the discrepancy? Why has there been this constant
"Red" Status of these metrics? According to HHS, we've actually been below these goals of 20% for floor beds and 15% of ICU the Entire time.

9/

Data from the Federal Government directly contradicts the @MetroNashville governments data.

Anyone out there want to dig deeper into this?

I suspect a couple reasonable explanations:

1) They are simply just calculating % available in a very different way.

10/

Perhaps it makes sense the way they do it. We would never know because it's never been explained.

2) There is a simple error in their reporting and they've never caught it.

/11

As of right now, from where I'm standing, the simple way to look at it is that data from the Federal Government directly contradicts the @MetroNashville governments data.

I'm sure this could be cleared up.

/END

Anyone can use this tool I created to look at the capacity over time for any area in the country. Just select dropdowns for state/county.

rationalground.com/hospital-and-i…