Is Your Hospital Overwhelmed With COVID-19 Patients? Find Out With This Tool : Shots – Health News – NPR

Health care workers at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston face another full-throttle workday last week. Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Health care workers at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston face another full-throttle workday last week.

The federal government on Monday released an updated set of detailed hospital-level data showing the toll COVID-19 is taking on health care facilities, including how many inpatient and ICU beds are available on a weekly basis.

Using an analysis from the University of Minnesota's COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, NPR has created a tool that allows you to see how your local hospital and your county overall are faring. (Jump to look-up tool.)

It focuses on one important metric how many beds are filled with COVID-19 patients and shows this for each hospital and on average for each county.

The ratio of COVID-19 hospitalizations to total beds gives a picture of how much strain a hospital is under. Though there's not a clear threshold, it's concerning when that rate rises above 10%, hospital capacity experts told NPR.

Anything above 20% represents "extreme stress" for the hospital, according to a framework developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

If that figure gets to near 50% or above, the stress on staff is immense. "It means the hospital is overloaded. It means other services in that hospital are being delayed. The hospital becomes a nightmare," IHME's Ali Mokdad told NPR.

Use the look-up tool below the map to find details about hospitals in your county.

Thomas Wilburn contributed to this report. This story was originally published on Dec. 9, 2020.

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Is Your Hospital Overwhelmed With COVID-19 Patients? Find Out With This Tool : Shots - Health News - NPR