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Comment by lone_post | Hacker News Reader

The US has the most ICU beds per capita among all countries. Germany is a close second.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-co...

Is that still true? These reported numbers for the US are very much outdated. Would love to see a source younger than a decade.

All seem to come from the same sources, a 2009 and a 2012 study. The Forbes article actually mentions an alternative source, an article from 2015 [2] which is actually looking at regional 2000-2009 data. You can also follow the links at Wikipedia [0].

For Germany, there are numbers from 2017: The German Office for Statistics is reported in 2019 28.031 ICU beds which is a rate of 33.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.

EDIT: This [3] WoPo article references data from 2016-2018: 93,000 ICU beds in total in the US. That's about 36 ICU beds per capita (aged 16 or older).

For comparison, Germany, based on the 28031 ICU beds and 70976000 inhabitants 16 or older [4] has 39,49 ICU beds per capita.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_...

[1] https://www.sciencemediacenter.de/alle-angebote/fact-sheet/d...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4351597/

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/23/map-place...

[4] https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis//online?operation=ta...

The number of beds per capita is one thing, how many are free or can be freed in the next few days/weeks is another. At least in Germany it was reported that a lot of them were in use and less than half were available for coronavirus patients.

> in Germany it was reported that a lot of them were in use

Why would this be unique to germany. Can we just assume this is more or less identical everywhere?

We can't. It's not just a number of beds. It's also how long people stay there (which really depends on healthcare system). E.g. in countries with poor healthcare level people tend to stay in bed longer than in countries with good healthcare. Plus the average "normal" level of ICU occupation might be different (e.g. one country has 70% threshold, while another one 40%).

Just yesterday on German news they reported that Germany had most ICU beds per capita in the world. No idea if it's true. I guess no one ever knows the correct current numbers.

Here is a full list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_...

Based on these numbers and in light of the current situation in Spain, the situation in the UK will indeed get very difficult.

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