As the situation becomes much worse in the coming weeks, one major concern is with overwhelming the health care system. A moderate outbreak could result in 200,000 patients needing intensive care, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The U.S. only has 100,000 intensive care beds, and most are already occupied. If tens of thousands become sick at once, people will simply not receive the care that they need. It will not only affect patients with coronavirus, but also others with heart attacks, strokes and conditions requiring intensive care for survival. In other countries, people have died because they couldn’t access care. We are at risk of that happening in the U.S. too.
Hospitals are already implementing their pandemic preparedness plans. They are increasing capacity, canceling routine procedures, ramping up telemedicine and counseling people who can to stay home.
But hospitals alone cannot solve this crisis. It’s up to all of us to decrease the demand for hospital care by reducing the rate of disease transmission. In epidemiology, this is called “flattening the curve.” We cannot stop transmission altogether, but we can slow it down. That way, we can reduce the number of acutely ill patients and reduce the likelihood that patients who need care have to go without.
What does this mean? So far, the U.S. has focused on containment: quarantining travelers and investigating contacts of the ill. As more and more cases are detected, public health agencies won’t be able to keep up, nor would it make sense to. The focus has to shift from containment to mitigation, meaning that instead of stopping individual transmission, the goal is to implement societal interventions of social distancing.
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