Hospitalization Rates in Santa Clara County

Santa Clara County public health department has provided not just COVID-19 case numbers and deaths but they’ve also provided information on hospitalizations. Having this information is incredibly useful because it allows me to do two things.

Santa Clara county at over capacity

I can project forward the hospitalizations and make a good guess as to when Santa Clara counties hospitals will be slammed.

From https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0YBO9C5v62A8ptNqXrOX1xibUAAc8fUxwT4m9ZsP1AMmHGb9CuTZ4Yp00#/8c4dcccd9e3845eb89f6401f919007f2 Santa Clara county has 4,252 staffed beds at an average utilization of 62%. This means that it should have roughly 1,600 beds to accommodate COVID-19 patients. With this bit of information we can predict Santa Clara might be at over capacity sometime between April 11th and April 18th.

Separate testing from “flattening” the curve

Since we have very poor visibility into how much testing is taking place in the Bay Area I can watch the differences between both curves and see if they start to diverge. If the red curve of hospitalizations rolls off then our social distancing is having an impact and fewer people are catching the coronavirus and going to the hospital. However if the blue line increases and the red line remains constant that means that the amount of testing is increasing and Santa Clara county is catching milder cases of COVID-19 that do not need hospitalization and wouldn’t have gotten reported previously. Of course both could happen simultaneously.