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Comment by lsh123 | Hacker News Reader

> Right now, as I type this, many hospitals in the United States have had all of their excess capacity filled with Covid-19 cases.

Today Santa Clara county has 65 people hospitalized:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:COVID-19_Cases_in_Sa...

In comparison, Stanford hospital has 600 beds:

https://facts.stanford.edu/about/hospital/

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Total beds is an incomplete picture. Stanford hospital appears to run at 88% capacity [1] and Seattle's Harborview operates at 95% capacity [2].

1 - https://stanfordhealthcare.org/content/dam/SHC/about-us/bond... (page 5)

2 - https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/short-staff...

A lot of the beds are used for routine scheduled stuff that can be postponed. While the ER/ICU/telemetry capacity is much smaller (can’t find online source but it’s about 150 beds in Stanford), these are usually reserved for postop and ER flow (car accidents, etc.). Plus there are expansion possibilities. Overall, there about 500-1000 beds for critical care in Santa Clara that can be made available (I also suspect there are not that many car accidents, broken legs, etc right now). Overall, we are at about 10x in available capacity right now.

Edit: source is my wife who used to be ER nurse and then ER nurse manager in several Bay Area hospitals.

Actually this link from another reply here shows 3.8k total beds in Santa Clara which confirms my estimate for critical care beds that can be made available (about 25% from total):

https://covid-19.direct/county/CA/Santa%20Clara

Ok, maybe not yet. But once you start the lockdown, exponential growth continues for a couple of weeks (at least). If it grows at the same rate as in Europe, at the end of those two weeks Santa Clara county will need to hospitalize more than 15000 people.

I strongly suspect that the epidemic spread will be very different between large and small cities, suburbs, and country side. Plus Santa Clara county has very different demographic than Italy.

BTW, with the amount of people going back and forth between Bay Area and China, I have hard time believing that we had no cases in Jan/Feb. I personally know two people (and I met with both within a few days after their return) who came back from Wuhan in Dec and early Jan. A lot of people were sick in late Dec and early Jan with very similar symptoms.

Santa Clara County started the lockdown a few days ago. Maybe that's where a lot of the dispute in this thread is coming from; for those of us living in the Bay Area, maximum emergency measures are a given, so the most urgent priorities left are manufacturing medical equipment and finding a way to lift those measures.

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