COVID Chronicle

PROJECT ING THE FUTURE

Filtering Data for Quality and Accuracy

As a brand-new virus, predicting things like fatality rate, how many people who are affected are symptomatic vs. non, and rate of transmission, we rely on emerging information. Experts were building models based on incomplete data, leading to wildly different predictions. Because of this, Northern Light Health focused our efforts on working with the Maine CDC on its “Hospital Demand Planning” team. This group met weekly and focused on three curves: a low demand curve (from IHME), and a middle and high demand curve that the state was developing, based on a model developed by Johns Hopkins.

Each week, the Northern Light Strategic Planning Department would package the new projections from the state, broken down by Northern Light region, and send this out to the local NLH hospital leadership teams. The good news is that our actual experience in the state (demonstrated by the black line in the adjacent graphic, that shows the state peaking on April 17 with 28 ICU admissions) was well lower than even the most conservative of the original estimates (i.e. 28 vs. 164), and dramatically less than the higher projections (28 vs. 13,203).

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