Missouri COVID-19 outbreak projected to peak April 19
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts the peak for COVID-19 in Missouri will hit on April 19 -- 22 days ahead of previous projections that predicted a peak on May 11.
ABC 17 News interviewed University of Missouri Health Care's Dr. Mark Wakefield on Tuesday about the projections.
"That predictor changed pretty dramatically from Friday to Monday," Wakefield said. "That was driven, I believe, in part by the statewide stay-at-home [order]."
Gov. Mike Parson issued a stay-at-home order for all of Missouri that took effect Monday. Now, health officials say there will be fewer resources needed if the new projected peak is correct.
"We've talked in the past about flattening the curve, which makes the peak less dramatic but prolongs the course of the pandemic," Wakefield said
IHME modeling shows a dramatic decrease in the expected number of hospital beds and ventilators with the new peak date being April 19. Officials predict Missouri will need 562 hospital beds, rather than the previous May 11 prediction of 2,055. There is now a predicted need of more than 2.5 times fewer ventilators, with needed invasive ventilators dropping from 247 to 95.
Lori Thombs, the director of the Social Science Statistics Center at the University of Missouri, said that the shaded areas are just as important as the dotted lines.
"They're all equally likely..." Thombs said. "That's what a confidence interval is about. You take a point estimate and you add and subtract some uncertainty."
Specifically, the area for Intensive Care Units needed is of concern. The green line represents the number of ICU beds the state has: 558.
"All the purple above the line can happen. Those represent days where we would be running out of ICU beds," said Thombs.
IHME predicts as many as 12 people could die per day from COVID-19 near the peak date. This is down from the previous projection of 20 deaths per day. However, the range is from two to 43. That hasn't changed since the previous projection.
Leaders at MU Health Care, like many other hospitals in mid-Missouri, say they feel prepared if projections change for the worse.
"That predictor is getting more information and more data, which is helping us make better predictions," Wakefield said. "We are prepared for a peak in the next week or so, but also I think we have contingency plans that maintain readiness for the next three to six weeks."
Wakefield said he expects Columbia may behave differently than the projections for the entire state, though, with a possible lag behind the peak. He said he believes the model is driven by cities such as St. Louis, which began to see cases earlier.
