1/ Let’s talk about #Covid hospitalizations. Seemingly every day the Covid Tracking Project reports another new high for admitted #Covid patients and the media eagerly (yes, eagerly) reports hospitals in LA and elsewhere are close to collapse.

So what’s really happening?

2/ Okay, let’s look at Arizona. A fair choice - it has more #Covid positive tests and hospitalizations per-capita than any other state. Covid patients fill 60% of its ICU beds. Its hospital executives are sounding alarms. The system must be collapsing, right?

Not exactly...

3/ The first graph is #Covid patients in ICU beds. Scary. They’ve risen almost 10-fold since the low in late September, from ~115 to 1,100. Overall inpatient trends are pretty much the same...

4/ Yet hospitals AREN’T overrun. Here’s the whole picture. As ICU beds fill with #Covid patients, their other patients vanish. Exactly the same trend took place during the summer. Remember, these are ICU beds, which shouldn’t be affected much by rescheduled elective surgeries...

5/ The overall inpatient picture is the same. On Sep. 30, AZ hospitals had 620 #Covid patients and 7,999 overall. Now they have 4,920 Covid patients - and 8,004 overall. And patients are more likely to be found with #Covid if they’re admitted for other reasons than go to the ER.

6/ So what’s going on? Three factors are obvious. First, hospitals are stretched and managing capacity. (Good!) Second, they are testing everybody to get the #Covid bonus. (Bad but understandable.) Third, remdesivir requires admission (to reduce the length of stay? But yes)...

7/ None of this says that hospitals aren’t under strain. At some point, trading #Covid for non-Covid patients can’t work. But it is striking that even in the state with the worst numbers, the hospitals continue to have open beds.