JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Following the first infections in the Wuhan City, COVID-19 became a global epidemic as declared by the World Health Organization (WHO). Since it is an airborne disease transmitted between humans many countries adopted a quarantine on their own population as well as closing borders. In Brazil many are discussing the best way to handle the epidemic moving forward. Since one of the reasons for the quarantine is to slow the spread of the disease so it does not overburden the healthcare system. In this work we implement a forecast of the demand for hospital beds for the next 30 days for every state in Brazil for different scenarios and analyse how long it would take for the demand to exceed current available hospital beds.

Objective:

Carry out the projection of hospitalization by COVID-19 in Brazil, analysis occurring by states, following different policies of social distance in order to predict whether in a window of 30 days, overcrowding of hospital beds could occur.

Methods:

Local regression, data exploration.

Results:

Prediction of a 30-day window for overcrowding Hospital beds, in view of the adoption of public measures adopted in the first 30 days of fighting COVID-19, in the countries of: Germany, Italy and South Korea

Conclusions:

By estimating the need for beds by Brazilian states, even adopting the best possible scenario with the population hospitalized for COVID-19 being discharged in a period of 10 days, in addition to the premise that all hospital beds (except for neonatal and pediatric) would be willing to receive the infected population, 5 states would collapse in the model adopted by South Korea, 16 Brazilian states would collapse on Germany models and all Brazilian states would collapse their health system based on the Italian model, in a 30 day time window. Therefore, it is recommended the adoption of public policies implemented by South Korea, in addition to increasing the number of beds with public policies with field hospitals (emergency beds for COVID-19). It is noteworthy that in this scenario the Brazilian health system would make available for COVID-19 patients all available hospital beds, which would result in the said secondary deaths to COVID-19, people who need a bed to be hospitalized due to other diseases (heart attack, car accident, stroke, etc.), but because of the overcrowd of the public health system would return home, resulting in an end that could have been contoured if hospital treatment had been given to the pacient.