To set the perspective for those not familiar, the population of the state is close to 900k, roughly the same as the city of San Francisco. The normal pace of all-cause deaths is about 24 per day, so with COVID-19 killing off 15 people per day it is probably the leading cause of death in that state today.
Definitely. The die, as they say, is already cast. Remember, too, that the trailing 7-day average of an exponential process is incredibly misleading. If it's 15 deaths per day by that measure, that means it's really 50 today and 100+ soon.
According to the South Dakota Department of Health site, they 36.2% of the ICU beds are currently available [1]. According to this article [2], that count includes NICU (infant) beds, which will not be very helpful for COVID-19, which mostly seriously infects adults.
I've looked into these states and its really hard to get a good idea how close we are. There are easy solutions to quickly expanding ICU beds:
1) moving patients who don't need to be in ICU back to the regular wards. Hospitals tend to have a "use it or lose it" view of ICU beds.
2) you can turn regulars ward beds into ICU beds fairly quickly.
The limiting factor is essentially the doctors/nurses/staff. They are able to squeeze more space by forcing doctors/nurses/staff to work longer hours. But you can't shift radiology doctors/nurses to ICU since they aren't qualified.
We'll know things are bad when there is a call for doctors from less hard areas to fly to the infected areas.
Long story short, its hard to know as layperson what % is bad, so we should just listen to the experts.
I have wondered that myself, and it's a valid consideration.
Anecdotally, I've seen quite a few people who work in and around ERs and ICUs reporting a sharp increase in 'business', which follows (but trails) Covid19 positive test data.
We obviously don't know with any degree of precision how bad things are at the macro scale, but I think it's undeniable that the current trajectory is pretty scary.
