It’s pretty interesting to drill down into that map. In my “past peak” area, all the “big” (for this area) hospitals are in the orange or red, while smaller hospitals are mostly “blue”. In one town (well over an hour away) with both a “large” and a smaller hospital, the larger facility is reporting -
Inpatient Beds:
97 inpatient beds occupied
101 inpatient beds total
3.96% of inpatient beds available
ICU Beds:
12 inpatient ICU beds occupied
16 inpatient ICU beds total
25% of inpatient ICU beds available
One bad multi-car accident on either of the 2 nearby Interstate highways nearby and they’ll be shipping out patients - not necessarily even critical ones. By those stats EVERY non-ICU room is occupied. (Makes sense, local docs say they’ve been full to the gills with moderate cases.)
The smaller facility:
Inpatient Beds:
6 inpatient beds occupied
47 inpatient beds total
87.23% of inpatient beds available (This makes NO sense at all - what hospital EVER has such low utilization?)
ICU Beds:
No Data Available
4 inpatient ICU beds total
No Data Available
I have a feeling data from some smaller hospitals is essentially useless.
Looking elsewhere across our region, some hospitals’ ICU’s are completely maxed out: The nearest to me has 24 of their 24 ICU beds in use, with just under 20% of the non-ICU beds still available; another a few miles away has 21 of 44 ICU beds available and similarly just under 20% of non-ICU beds available. The latter may be an example of ICU beds available but some poorly purposed for respiratory diseases: That hospital is where most ambulatory auto accident patients go, and we fairly often have accidents sending several serious or worse patients there (esp. from the omnipresent (small “o”) work zones on the Interstate hwy.
One other thing I noticed is that facilities near us that specialize in extended recovery type care (no ICU beds, they take mostly patients recovering from ICU time) are quite full. One I’m personally familiar with has 21 of 22 inpatient beds occupied.