jasminegardner
commented
4 years ago Thank you for your comment. We are going to add this functionality but at the moment it is more important to get initial data and understand the base case data without extraneous assumptions. It is obvious that hospitals being overwhelmed is an issue which will highly increase the rate of death (as we see in Italy). In such a situation, it is hard to quantify the actual effect because 1) we do not definitely know how many ICU beds are actually in Sweden (this is not public data), 2) the Swedish government and folkhälsomyndigheten are committed to increasing the number of ICU and hospital beds as the situation rises (it's hard to pin down a moving target) and 3) we have not directly quantified the rates of death without proper ICU care (we are working on getting a reasonable estimate). Ideally, we would like to show a scenario where theoretically there are enough hospital beds and the death rate (which is fairly well quantified at this point) is at normal rates and show a secondary worst case scenario which involves the collapse of the healthcare system.
MarcusUppmax
peterkasson
akesandgren
Mortality rate in ICU should depend on whether ICU resources are overwhelmed. Just testing the code a little bit with 100k population yields scenarios with up to 43 ICU patients per 100k, which is about 7 times the number that Sweden usually maintains.
I recall seeing an article a couple of weeks ago estimating the change in CFR between a non-overwhelmed healthcare system and an overwhelmed one, but I cannot locate it anymore.
An alternative, if mortality rate cannot be quantified accurately, is to not report deaths in this simulation. Number of hospital and ICU beds required is perhaps more useful information in any case.