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    Lessons From The COVID-19 Crisis: Overcrowding Hospitals Cost Lives

    Researchers have quantified the price paid for fast-spreading COVID-19 infections. Patients who might have survived otherwise perished in crowded ICUs.
    by Will Stone Mar 18, 2021 4 minutes
    Many hospitals, including Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, reported reaching capacity in their ICUs during the winter surge in COVID hospitalizations. These conditions, according to research, may have led to more deaths.

    Health care systems endured a stress test like no other over the past year as COVID-19 patients filled up hospital beds and intensive care units. Health care workers pleaded with the public to "flatten the curve" yet each surge in 2020 was worse than the next.

    Now two recent studies quantify the consequences of flooding hospitals with COVID-19 patients, and add urgency to continued efforts to keep cases and hospitalizations down.

    The research, from both the U.S. and the U.K., shows that when ICUs fill up, COVID-19 patients' chances of dying from the disease rise dramatically, and this is despite improvements in treatment and care developed since last spring.

    In the first , published in , researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs found a patients' chance of dying of COVID-19 nearly doubled if hospitalized when ICUs were busiest compared to times with fewer patients.

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