Hospitalizations and Social Distancing

his chart shows what happens when you increase social distancing from 30% to 50% to 60%.

The green line is the normal hospital capacity in Kern County. This is how many beds we have available in our hospitals at any given time for COVID-19 patients. The red line shows the hospital surge capacity. This is when hospitals are full, but have the ability to create more space for patients.

Increasing social distancing from 30% to 60% decreases the peak hospitalization census by 97% - instead of 100 people being hospitalized, you can lower that to 3 people.

Increasing social distancing from 30% to 50% more than doubles the time it will take us to reach hospital surge capacity, so instead of 3 to 4 months it would take 7 to 10 months. This gives all of us more time to implement all of the interventions - for hospitals to prepare, for researchers to find an effective treatment, for each of us to take measures to reduce transmission.

If we increase social distancing to 60%, you can see that we will never exceed the normal hospital capacity.

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