Will Coronavirus Stress Maryland Hospitals To Capacity?

BALTIMORE, MD — As the number of cases of new coronavirus grows, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has said closed hospitals should reopen in an effort to free up 6,000 additional beds. The Baltimore area is expected to run out of hospital beds if a few hundred people who are infected with coronavirus need them, according to an analysis from Harvard and ProPublica.

COVID-19 is a respiratory illness caused by a virus that can lead to fever, cough or shortness of breath. Most people who are infected with coronavirus will experience mild or no symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

More severe complications include pneumonia, organ failure and death, the CDC reports.

In Maryland, 85 people have tested positive for COVID-19, the Maryland Department of Health reported Wednesday morning. That is an increase of 28 since Tuesday. Three people so far have recovered, officials said.

"There have been 14 hospitalizations since the virus began to affect the state," Charlie Gischlar, spokesman for the Maryland Department of Health, said Wednesday evening.

About 5 percent of those with the new coronavirus will require treatment in the intensive care unit, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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In the Baltimore area, there are nearly 7,000 hospital beds, but those are not enough, according to an analysis by Harvard Global Health Institute and ProPublica.

Mercy Medical Center was given emergency approval Wednesday from state regulatory officials to expand its acute care capacity by 32 hospital beds. Its contractor anticipates the new unit will be ready within 75 days.

The Maryland Hospital Association is coordinating a plan with individual hospitals to determine how to address the need, according to Gischlar. An outline for plan is anticipated within a week to 10 days, he said Wednesday night.

Patch reached out to the University of Maryland Medical System, LifeBridge Health, MedStar Health and Johns Hopkins for additional information regarding their plans to accommodate additional patients. We will update this story as soon as we hear back from them.

From ProPublica:

As of 2018, Baltimore had 6,930 total hospital beds, of which about 73 percent were occupied, potentially leaving only 1,890 beds open for additional patients. The bed count includes 840 beds in intensive care units, according to data from the American Hospital Association and the American Hospital Directory. Intensive care units are best equipped to handle the most acute coronavirus cases.

The Baltimore region has a population of about 2.6 million residents; 15 percent are over the age of 65. The experience in other countries has shown that elderly patients have significantly higher hospitalization and fatality rates from the coronavirus.

In the moderate scenario, in which 40 percent of the adult population contracts the disease over 12 months, Baltimore would be among the regions that would need to expand capacity.

It is estimated that about 8 percent of the adult population would require hospital care. In a moderate scenario where 40 percent of the population is infected over a 12-month period, hospitals in Baltimore would receive an estimated 168,000 coronavirus patients. The influx of patients would require 5,590 beds over 12 months, which is three times the number of available beds in that time period. The Harvard researchers' scenarios assume that each coronavirus patient will require 12 days of hospital care on average, based on data from China.

In the Baltimore region, intensive care units would be especially overwhelmed and require additional capacity. Without coronavirus patients, there are only 300 available beds on average in intensive care units, which is four times less than what is needed to care for all severe cases.

People can visit the Maryland Department of Health's coronavirus page or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's coronavirus disease situation summary for additional information.

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