[Bagor]

Originally Posted by NuclearFart

You know what's even scarier, and has yet to make the media? If the trend continues, and the average ICU stay is 1-2 weeks, and we only have ~10-20 ventillators per hospital, we are rapidly going to run out of ventillators. You can figure out the implications.

What figures/trends are you basing this on? i.e. What fold of an increase of H1N1 admissions are being observed compared to average admissions from seasonal flu?

I accept that this is a 20 day old report.


"It is more difficult to interpret the Canadian data as it does not cover all ICU beds in the country, but if we use all 215 confirmed, probable and suspect cases for the 38 reporting ICUs (the characteristics of patients in the paper only include the 168 confirmed and suspected cases) and use the figure in the paper that there were a total of 278 admitted to ICUs in the country with a 2009 population of 34 million, this represents about 8 ICU admissions per million population.

Assuming similar age structures for these three developed countries, the Canadian population demand for ICU admission is about a third of the southern hemisphere figure. This could well be because the Australia/New Zealand data were from the usual influenza season while the Canadian data were from a prodromal or herald wave that occurred outside of flu season. I expect we'll find out soon enough.

It is worthwhile noting, however, that even with triple the demand for influenza-related ICU admissions, the two southern hemisphere countries were able to cope by making adjustments in schedules and practices.

The comparison just made is imperfect, at best. It doesn't take account of the uneven distribution of demand, temporally and geographically, that is typical of influenza in general, and pandemics in particular. It doesn't differentiate the adult and pediatric distribution nor the varying availability of skilled nursing and medical care.

It is clear in the Canadian indigenous First Nations population there was greatly increased risk, and these are also the populations with the least timely, least well-staffed and least accessible critical care beds.

National averages don't tell the whole story. But the small part of the story they do tell suggests that the infrastructure to handle this pandemic exists in both Canada and the US and what is needed is planning to use it most efficiently."


http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasur...d_use_in_c.php