LOUISVILLE, Ky. — As COVID-19 case counts climb, patients in hospital beds rise. Our FOCUS team has been tracking these trends.
For the past month, we watched as the number of patients has nearly doubled.
Let's take a closer look.
KENTUCKY
This graph shows the number of covid patients hospitalized in blue. The number of patients in intensive care are in orange.
From left to right, you can see the sharp increase from October to November.
Only about 7% of people infected need hospital treatment and less than 2% are admitted to intensive care, and about 1.3% never recover.
As you can see from the labels we added, the number of patients nearly doubles from this time in October.
Even when you factor in those needed medical treatment not related to COVID-19, we are still not in danger of running out of beds.
However, human resources available are a concern for leaders.
"There is not as much concern with the number of beds as there is staffing availability for nurses and doctors to deal with patients that have COVID, so that's why we've all got to be working together to take responsibility for keeping this COVID-19 in check," Louisville Mayor, Greg Fischer said this week.
INDIANA
The data is different but the trends are the same. The blue line shows the covid patients in intensive care or ICU beds tonight.While the orange line on the bottoms charts patients on ventilators.
Again, a steady and steep increase.
Moving from left to right, the first label shows ICU patients from this time in September.
From September to October patients in the ICO jumped 11%.
Compared to the label on the far right, COVID-19 patients in the ICU have increased 85%.
In Indiana, about 9.6% of those positive need hospitalization, according to the Regenstrief Institute, 18% check-in at the ER, about 2% need ICU treatment.
Those are hospitalized are very seriously ill; about 16% of those that need hospital treatment succumb to the illness and never go home.