Review of the media's push for hospital fear & panic.

There are 6000+ hospitals in US, and statistically some of them will have a high occupancy rate in any given year.

Taking a step back to look at the bigger picture, the numbers look quite different. Where's the full story?

How can this be with COVID hospitalizations increasing?

1. Wide COVID spread means people coming in for non-COVID issues but still count as COVID patients.
2. COVID patients replacing flu patients.

You have to look at total hospitalizations to gauge what's really happening.

3. You also have to compare to previous year baseline to get a sense of what's normal.

You can see for example that Los Angeles is experiencing a surprisingly normal year at its major hospitals.

Source: http://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/dhs/1070348_DHSCOVID-19Dashboard.pdf

Are there some hospitals that may have high occupancy? Sure, and that's not unusual.

Even larger hospitals are historically used to surge conditions when they often happen in the winter.

Story from 2018: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patients/

But the widespread panic and national headlines that hospitals in general are being overrun is unfortunately another example of unnecessary fearmongering.

For any hospitalization story/stat/dashboard to be useful, it must include 2 facts:

1. Total occupancy percent (not just COVID occupancy).
2. Comparison to total occupancy in previous years.

Any dashboard missing this is simply incomplete or intentionally misleading.