COVID-19 Case Forecasts and Hospital Capacity

Charles Branas, Gelman Endowed Professor and Department Chair of Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology

An effort to make projections for each county in the U.S. over the next 42 days of whether the health care system will be overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, under a variety of social distancing and hospital surge response scenarios. The project has also estimated the number of deaths from COVID-19 that are likely to occur after a county's health care system is overwhelmed. The projections are updated weekly. The project involves having built an inventory of hospital critical care beds and staffing levels, creating models for how intensively hospitals can launch surge responses and forecasts of daily COVID-19 cases.