Anticipating the hospital burden of future COVID-19 epidemic waves

  1. Corentin Boennec
  2. Samuel Alizon
  3. Mircea T Sofonea

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Abstract

Forecasting SARS-CoV-2 epidemic trends with confidence more than a few weeks ahead is almost impossible as these entirely depend on political decisions. We address this problem by investigating the consequences for the health system of an epidemic wave of a given size. This approach yields semi-quantitative results that depend on the proportion of the population already infected and vaccinated. We introduce the COVimpact software, which allows users to visualise estimated numbers of ICU admissions, deaths, and infections stratified by age class at the French departmental, regional, or national level caused by the wave. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach by showing that for France, even with a 95% vaccination coverage, the current vaccine efficiency against the delta variant would make a large epidemic wave infecting 25% of the population difficult to sustain for the current hospital bed occupancy capacity. Overall, using the final epidemic wave size and ignoring detailed epidemiological dynamics yields valuable and practical insights to optimise public health response to epidemics.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.08.19.21262280: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.08.19.21262280 on medRxiv