Covid-19 may soon peak in three major US

cities. Here’s what that means

April 7, 2020

By Alexandra Ossola
Special projects editor

FROM OUR OBSESSION

Machines with Brains

AI is upending companies, industries, and humanity.

New York, Detroit, and New Orleans—three metropolitan areas

with some of the highest number of Covid-19 cases in the US—
may all be hitting their peak number of hospital beds needed
within the next week.

“If mitigation in New York worked—and we believe it is working—

the cases are going to start to go down, but the mortality will be a
lag behind that because of the co-morbidities and other
conditions,” said Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response
coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, in a
press briefing on Saturday.

Birx and her team base these predictions on epidemiological

models—in particular, those created by the Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) based at the University of
Washington’s School of Medicine.

When you hear of the pandemic “peaking” in these cities, what

people are likely referring to is peak medical resource utilization.
Many of these models, including the one from IHME, predict
hospitalization rates, ICU admission rates, ventilator use, and
deaths. In part, that’s because it’s simply easier to obtain that
data—as opposed to, say, infection rates, which are impossible to
know in the US since such little testing has been done.
Thanks to what IHME’s director calls “a massive infusion of new
data,” the model’s creators can feel increasingly confident in the
accuracy of those kinds of predictions, which were updated on
Sunday.

But not every model agrees with IHME. In the absence of a single,
definitive national epidemiological model, states and many other
organizations have been left to create their own, so that public
health officials can apply the right mitigation strategies and
hospitals can prepare for how many patients they expect to
receive.

Models can disagree based on the assumptions of their creators.

At the beginning of an outbreak, epidemiologists use estimates for
how many people might be susceptible to the disease, how long a
person stays sick, how long it takes for an infected person to
develop symptoms, how likely a person is to contract the disease if
they come into contact with someone who has it, and how likely
someone is to be hospitalized or die from it.

All that information is in very short supply when a disease is new,

so researchers start with educated guesses. “In early stages you
use a lot of assumptions, then you refine models over time using
real data,” says Glen Mays, a public health expert at the Colorado
School of Public Health at the University of Colorado