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News Release
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New KHN Reporting Reveals Half of Nation’s Counties Lack Intensive
Care Beds As COVID-19 Cases Rapidly Increase
Free
Lookup Tool Available To See Your Local Situation
The
rapidly increasing number of national COVID-19 cases is raising alarm among
experts and state and local officials about health systems’ capacity to treat
patients effectively and revealing the uneven geographic distribution of the
country’s health care resources.
A
special report by KFF’s Kaiser Health News (KHN) shows that
more than half the counties in the United States have no intensive care unit
(ICU) beds, which poses a particular danger to patients age 60 or older who
fall victim to the coronavirus. Hospital ICUs have sophisticated equipment,
such as bedside machines to monitor a patient’s heart rate and ventilators to
help them breathe ― trouble breathing is a common symptom among seriously ill
COVID-19 patients. Even in communities that do have ICU beds, the numbers
vary wildly ― with some having just one bed available for thousands of senior
residents.
KHN’s
coverage includes a 50-state map that shows which counties have no lCU beds
as well as which lack a hospital altogether. Thirty seven million Americans
reside in such counties. An online “lookup” tool lets readers check the ICU
bed capacity near their homes or in surrounding counties.
This
report is part of KFF’s continuing efforts on the coronavirus outbreak. The national story
also ran in USA Today and, as always, KHN content is available to republish free of charge. News organizations can
request localized data by contacting Chris Lee.
About The
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Kaiser Health News:
Filling
the need for trusted information on national health issues, KFF (the Henry J.
Kaiser Family Foundation) is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco,
California. KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF and is the
nation’s leading and largest health and health policy newsroom, producing
stories that run on khn.org and are published by hundreds of news
organizations across the country.
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Thursday, June 4, 2020
Half of Nation’s Counties Lack Intensive Care Beds, KHN Reporting Reveals
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