You can now know how many NJ coronavirus patients are in critical care, discharged
As New Jersey faces a peak in COVID-19 hospitalizations in the coming days, it unveiled a hospital dashboard on Thursday that gives the public a better idea of the scope of the virus and the state's hospital needs.
The website shows just a snapshot in time, and data changes each time a hospital enters information. Questions may still remain, since the data does not include a guide or explanation or provide context. For instance, it doesn't give the percentage of hospital space already occupied in New Jersey.
As of Thursday the data on the dashboard showed that 7,363 individuals with confirmed or potential cases of COVID-19 were hospitalized. Of these, 1,523 patients are in intensive care, 846 are in critical care and 4,619 are in medical surgical beds. It is unclear why these bed numbers added together do not equal the total hospitalized number.
The dashboard also showed that 604 patients were discharged in the last 24 hours.
The dashboard is updated daily with data from hospitals, collected by the New Jersey Hospital Association. Every hospital reports by 10 p.m., said state Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli, and the dashboard changes as hospitals submit their data.
Before the pandemic, New Jersey had close to 2,000 critical care beds. In the past few weeks, all hospitals have doubled their capacity to around 4,000 critical care beds, Persichilli said. In addition, the state has been quickly building field hospitals with federal assistance and opening closed hospitals and hospital wings, and it is considering using hotels and dormitories for patients.
The dashboard also shows how many beds are available. The most recent data as of April 6 shows New Jersey hospitals have 136 critical care beds, 334 intensive care beds, 2,863 medical surgical beds and the potential to expand to a further 18,000 beds.
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Until Thursday, the public did not have a good handle on how strained the state's hospitals are with coronavirus patients — or how seriously the virus was hurting its residents.
At New Jersey's daily coronavirus briefings, officials listed newly discovered positive cases and deaths due to COVID-19 but didn't report comprehensive hospitalization or recovery rates to the public in a consistent fashion.
For weeks, New Jersey officials stressed the need for more ventilators and listed the myriad methods the state was using to build more hospital beds and increase critical care capacity, but didn't provide numbers.
More than half, 52.2%, of the statewide supply of ventilators is being used, or 1,551 ventilators. This number is higher than the recorded 1,523 intensive care units because hospitals have expanded their capacity and created critical care space outside the units that can still handle critical care patients.
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New Jersey has been securing shipments from the federal stockpile and received 100 of the life-sustaining machines from California. New Jersey also halted all elective surgeries and inventoried the state's anesthesia machines, which can be converted to work as ventilators. Police Superintendent Pat Callahan said that as of Friday the state will have distributed 240 ventilators to hospitals.
State officials continue to stress that they need more. Health professionals will be trained how to co-vent, or hook up two patients to one machine, and an advisory panel will examine, among other things, ethical guidelines to determine who gets a ventilator if there is a shortage.
New Jersey has diagnosed 51,027 positive cases of COVID-19, and 1,700 residents have died from coronavirus complications, officials said Thursday.
The state runs multiple models a week to project when the state's hospitals will feel the biggest strain and what numbers of beds and critical care beds are needed in the worst-case scenario. These models include many unknowns and estimates, as New Jersey tests only symptomatic individuals, and each time an input changes, the results change.
Based on a Wednesday night analysis by the Innovation Center, New Jersey's peak could occur in two to three days, resulting in an estimated 14,400 hospitalizations and 2,880 critical care cases.
Persichilli said the rate at which hospitalizations are doubling is slowing. As of Wednesday evening, the time estimated to double the number of patients hospitalized was 28.8 days, compared with 14.6 days the previous day, and 12.4 the day before that.
To illustrate how projections shift: On Monday, Gov. Phil Murphy said social distancing measures appeared to be working and were slowing the growth rate of positive cases, though he prefaced that by saying the state could not soon relax its stay-at-home measures.
He presented models on Monday predicting that peak infections at one time could range from 86,000 to 509,000, and hospitalizations could range between 9,000 and 36,000 at one time in April.
The projections also included possible ventilator and ICU needs: Its worst-case scenario prediction as of Monday was that New Jersey could need anywhere between 1,987 and 7,811 ventilators, and between 2,293 and 9,013 ICU beds.
Hospitals in different regions of the state are feeling the strain differently.
“We’re not slowing down,” said Dr. Adam Jarrett, chief medical officer of Holy Name Medical Center, “but the rate of increase is less.” So far, the Teaneck hospital has admitted only a few patients from nursing homes with COVID-19. Whatever slowing down may have occurred would quickly be erased if a lot of patients are transferred from long-term-care facilities.
The hospital had 200 patients being treated for coronavirus illness on Thursday afternoon, with 35 on ventilators, a slight decrease in the number of ventilator-dependent patients. More than 100 patients have recovered sufficiently to be discharged, he said.
The hospital has added 36 intensive care beds since the crisis began and expects to add between 30 and 40 more when renovation of another area of the building is complete. “We hope we don’t need it, but we’re ready,” he said.
Ashley Balcerzak is a reporter in the New Jersey Statehouse. For unlimited access to her work covering New Jersey’s legislature and political power structure, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: balcerzaka@northjersey.com Twitter: @abalcerzak