Something here doesn’t add up

The models being used by Minnesota predict that about 4000 ICU beds would be needed at the peak of the pandemic.  The state can cobble together 2700 or so, at the moment.

The earlier version of the models used a number of 235 ICU beds, according to Kevin Roche of Healthy Skeptic, and in early March, when I first looked into Minnesota’s number of ICU beds, it was about 250...according to the internet. The governor in late March said there were 243 adult ICU beds.

The current number of coronavirus patients in the ICU is about 75.

But, a Star Tribune article on Monday said that there were nearly 850 ICU beds total in use at the end of last week, of which coronavirus cases were a small fraction.

So who are in the other 600 beds, that the state may or may not have had a few weeks ago???  Some number of these must be infants and other children; a quick search tells me that the state’s available NICU beds run into the hundreds. But still.

I said when I got sick a few weeks ago, that it was either with the coronavirus, or with something that was just like it, and equally nasty. It certainly could have put me into the hospital, if things had been a little different. Is this whatever-it-is filling up the ICUs now? And what is it, if it tests negative for coronavirus?

As an aside, either the bug that I got is a very lingering one, or I’ve been reinfected a time or two at home. How much being infected produces immunity is still an open question with the coronavirus; we may have to adapt to it becoming endemic on a global scale.

In related news, it has come out that two-thirds of coronavirus deaths in Minnesota were of people in “congregate care” settings, and also that 90% of deaths were in people age 70 or older.

Update:  The number of 243 adult ICU beds was apparently an increase already from an earlier number of 197. Like many states, Minnesota regulates the number of hospital beds; usually that is done through a “Certificate of Need” process, but Minnesota had basically frozen the number of hospital beds by law—even through population increases.