Full 4/16/20 presser archived at C-SPAN.
Key excerpts:
“It’s been a collaborative effort with the (Rhode Island) Department of Health [RIDOH], our own experts, Brown University, and Brown University’s Policy Lab. By the way, I wanna give a huge shout out of thanks to Brown University. I called you over a month ago, and you gave us your very best statisticians and public health experts, and epidemiologists. Thank you for being a great partner…The blue line you could think of as our best guess of what we think the next few weeks will look like in Rhode Island. The blue line assumes all of the current restrictions—the stay at home order, the mask wearing, social distancing—are in place, and we are doing a pretty good job of adhering to them. (Not a perfect job, but a good job of adhering to them.) In that scenario, we thank our peak will be around May 3, 2020, that means last week of April, first week of May, approximately, and at that time, we will need about 2,250…(O)n your screen, you should be seeing a red line. That red line represents what we think will happen if we stop taking social distancing seriously. And in that scenario, the peak comes sooner, probably April 27th, and obviously the peak is much higher. In that scenario, the red line that you’re seeing, we’ll need closer to 4,300 hospital beds.”
Video embed, and figures, and a table with “modeled” vs. actual covid-19 hospitalizations (per RIDOH data hub), during the first covid-19 wave in Rhode Island.
“Modeled” hospitalizations
Actual hospitalizations were 6- to 12-FOLD LOWER than “modeled”!
Link to pdf of actual covid-19 hospitalizations figure: RIDOH actual hosps first wave_pdf
Table. Peak covid-19 hospitalizations (i.e., “with” covid-19) during first wave in Rhode Island, “modeled” vs. actual
