Early predictions underestimated how long patients with COVID-19 would need to stay in hospitals and how many would require intensive care, according to a study looking at California and Washington state.
A principal goal of physical distancing and lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic is to prevent healthcare services from becoming overwhelmed.
In the United States, policymakers had to rely almost entirely on data from China, where the pandemic started, to inform their early estimates of how it would impact hospitals.
A study by researchers at the University of California (UC) Berkeley and Kaiser Permanente now suggests that this led to significant underestimates of the average time patients would stay in hospitals, how many