Exponential growth of COVID19 in Des Moines, IA
Liz Specht offers an analysis to look at how quickly hospital beds will fill up in the US due to severe COVID19 symptoms. Let’s perform this analysis for Des Moines.
Base assumptions
The assumptions here are that there will be a
- doubling of individuals with COVID19 every 6 days,
- 10% of those individuals will need hospitalization, and
- hospitalization lasts 3-6 weeks.
The details for Des Moines, IA are that
- population is 217,521,
- Des Moines has 1373 beds, and
- 1 individual is sick today (12 March 2020).
To be clear, I have no evidence to support that somebody in Ames already has COVID19, but people are coming back from international travel and Iowa does have 13 presumptive positive cases, most stemming from a single cruise.
To be clear, I have no evidence to support that somebody in Ames already has COVID19, but people are coming back from international travel and Iowa does have 13 presumptive positive cases, most stemming from a single cruise.
But, the CDC’s testing requirements are that either
- you need to have traveled to either China, Korea, Italy, Japan, or Iran or
- have come into contact with a confirmed COVID19 case.
So even if you have the symptoms and have been traveling, i.e. on airplanes and in airports with potentially infected individuals, you cannot be tested. This means that many people have COVID19 and are not confirmed, i.e. we basically have no idea who in Ames or Iowa or the US have COVID19.
As Liz Specht suggested, if only 30% of beds are available in Des Moines then we run out of beds around May 22th. If all beds are available, we run out of beds around May 15th. If some of these assumptions are off, we run out of hospital beds a couple of weeks before or after these predictions.
If 1 person is sick at the Iowa High School Boys Basketball Tournament, then we have a Biogen situation on our hands. At that conference 58% of attendees contracted COVID19. If 58% of the attendees at this tournament contract COVID19, then we massively accelerate this timeline and hospital beds will be gone weeks earlier.
We need to do everything we can to flatten the curve. Here is a list of what you should do.
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