Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Tracking the load put on Ontario's hospitals

The rationale behind so called "lock down" measures was that our beleaguered health care system would not be able to handle the strain of Covid-19 cases, There was, (and still is) a lot of merit to that line of thinking.  Ontario hospitals were operating over capacity a lot of the time before the pandemic, hallway medicine and long waits in ER were already the norm.

In order to free up capacity a number of steps were taken, delaying elective and needed surgeries and cancer screenings as well as moving elderly sick patients to Long Term Care facilities.  Still the early models were predicting that critical care space was going to be exceeded many times over.  We can be thankful that hasn't happened, and hopefully it never does.

In order to keep an eye on the strain being put on our hospitals I'm going to track the numbers provided by the Ontario Hospital Association here.  The data I've been able to find only gives the current numbers, so I don't know what the peak is exactly. BlogTO reported on May 20th that the number of hospitalized was at 975 and trending lower, so I'm going to assume, (dangerous I know) that the peak was over 1,000 at some point previously.

Here's the link for the OHA site where I'll be getting the numbers:


I'm doing this for my own edification, others though are welcome to follow along if they wish.  I want to track whether the burden on our health care system is increasing or decreasing, or staying about the same.  I'll update it frequently, although not necessarily every single day.  Given the recent massive gathering in Trinity Bellwoods park in Toronto these numbers should start climbing higher as May rolls into June according to everything we're being told about the science.  

Date                                             Hospitalizations    ICU     Ventilators
Monday May 25                          878                        148      104
Tuesday May 26                          859                        148      114
Wednesday May 27                    848                        143      113
Thursday May 28                        847                        150      117
Friday May 29                            833                         137        94
Saturday May 30                        826                         129      100
Sunday May 31                          801                         121        84
Monday June 1                           781                         118        90
Tuesday June 2                           781                         125        89
Wednesday June 3                      801                         125       87
Thursday June 4                         791                         127        92
Friday June 5                              776                         121       94
Saturday June 6                          749                         118       94
Sunday June 7                            673                         117       97 

The OHA site I've been using has stopped publishing the numbers for some reason, however CTV news has been reporting them for a while now and the numbers have always matched.  CTV's news for Tuesday June 9th however doesn't include the number of patients on ventilators.  I'll keep tracking and will now hyperlink to the CTV articles or other reliable sources.

Tuesday June 9th......................600..........................116
Wednesdy June 10th................580...........................118.........86
Thursday June 11th..................538...........................120
Sunday June 14th ....................438...........................103.........77
Monday June 15th....................419...........................104.........69
Friday June 26th.......................256............................61..........41
Monday June 30th....................232............................46..........35


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