Metric of Highest Importance
The people of the world that have been paying close attention to the pandemic have been chopping up the data by geography in various ways. Early reports were, logically, by country. But its been going down to smaller regions, and I think that is much more helpful.
We are now getting data by state, which is better, but not the 'right' region size; it's not small enough.
Hospitals serve an "MSA" (metropolitan statistical area), and this is the level where data aggregation would be most helpful, IMO. Why? Because the resource that's of the highest concern is ICU beds, and those are pretty exclusively housed in hospitals. Of course, an ICU bed without staff is not helpful, but lets say we don't run out of staff before we run out of ICU beds (which is a good bet, since, generally we have so few ICU beds per capita).
Right now, we need to watch the NYC MSA, because that
could be the fate of all cities as the weeks pass. If you say that 5 or 10 times the number of confirmed cases can approximate the actual cases in a population, the ICU beds in NYC are going to be 100% occupied (if they're not gone already...I didn't check that).
There's an effort to move patients, both COVID-19 and not, around to other hospitals where there is room.
I wondered how many beds and ICUs Georgia has, and found this number for Atlanta. Atlanta proper has a population of about 500K, but the metro area has 4.6 million.
Great question. I think the leaders that are making the "stay home" proclamations probably justified their decision based on local intelligence about their population and their hospitals' capacity to treat ICU patients.
The ability to transfer patients might be a sticky one. If I were the mayor that issued a lock-down early and was keeping it's head above water ICU-wise, would I accept patients from some other city that was trying to "keep the economy going" and so didn't lock-down? Tough sell.
Looking at the difference between Italian cities, I think there's hope that some US MSA's will avoid a resource crunch, and other will not. Answering a question above, was the difference between Italian cities just "bad luck", I think the answer is partially "yes", but also how soon and how effective did they get their populations to comply with preventive measures. Spring break in Florida, for instance, is probably going to be viewed as a one of the most colossal mistakes of the pandemic. Time will tell. Stay safe.
