Is a COVID19 Quarantine Justified in Chile or USA Right Now?

TL;DR

This paper introduces the COVID-19 Burden Index to assess healthcare system strain and warns that Chile, USA, and UK risk healthcare collapse without immediate infection rate reductions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel index to quantify healthcare system stress during COVID-19 and provides urgent policy recommendations based on this measure.

Findings

Chile, USA, UK at risk of healthcare collapse within 7 days

COVID-19 Burden Index correlates with healthcare system capacity

Immediate infection control measures are urgently needed

Abstract

During the current COVID-19 pandemic it is imperative to give early warnings to reduce mortality. However, non-specialist such as authorities and the general population face several problems to understand the real thread of this pandemic, and under/overestimation of its risk are a commonplace in the press and social media. Here we define an index, which we call the COVID-19 Burden Index, that relates the capacities of the healthcare system of a given country to treat severe and critical cases. Its value is 0 if there is no extra strain in the healthcare system, and it reaches 1.0 when the collapse is imminent. As of 23 March 2020, we show that Chile, the USA, UK, among other countries, must reduce the rate of infections right now, otherwise, in less than 7 days they could be in a catastrophic situation such as Italy, Spain and Iran.