The Coming Health Care Tsunami (Likely) in Cd. Juárez:  March 18, 2020

The Grim Statistics:  ABQ and Juárez Compared

From Diario, today (click here)

Juárez total Hospital Beds, public and private:   678;      Albuquerque:      1996*

Juárez total Intensive Care beds                          60;      Albuquerque        344**
Juárez total Intensive Care beds with ventilator    20;      Albuquerque       N/A

Greater Albuquerque, defined as the Albuquerque Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) has a population of about 915,000.  Cd. Juárez has a population of about 1.3 million.  Yet Albuquerque has well over twice as many hospital beds as Juárez, and almost six times as many intensive care beds.

If the proportion of people who get this disease is what epidemiologists call "light;"  that is, 20% of the total population (this was the Swine Flu's global reach a decade ago), and 10% of these will need hospitalization, (in New York Governor Cuomo said it was more like 17%--I'm being pretty conservative), you are talking about 26,000 persons needing hospitalizations in Juárez.  If 30% of those hospitalized need intensive care, this will require about 7800 intensive care hospital beds spread out over, say, six months.  If the average stay in intensive care is only 3 days, with no time spent between patients, and the need for beds is spread out evenly over six months, this will require 130 intensive care beds per day.  If there is a surge of cases, the intensive care system will be completely overwhelmed.  I'm not an expert in health care, I'm just doing some back-of-the envelope arithmetic based on what seem like reasonable assumptions about the scope of this pandemic.  We still don't know a lot about the disease, but we do know what happened in Italy in the past few weeks, and the experience there should alarm us, not just in Juárez and El Paso but in all of New Mexico as well.

So far we have no idea how many people may have the disease already in Juárez (or Albuquerque or El Paso, for that matter).  The only way we can find out is with massive testing, which, as far as we know, is not taking place in the region, and the only way we know how to slow down the spread--since asymptomatic persons can infect others--is through tight lockdowns and serious social isolation.  Given that El Paso and Juárez are part of the same urban swath, the same can be said of El Paso.  Whether the measures taken in these cities will be enough to "flatten the curve" will become clear soon enough.

* AHD.Com (click here)
 **NM in Depth (click here)