The Tennessee Department of Health said 633 residents have been hospitalized with COVID-19, but that figure is a cumulative – not current – number.
“This number indicates the number of patients that were ever hospitalized during their illness, it does not indicate the number of patients currently hospitalized,” the Department of Health notes in its daily COVID-19 briefing.
During a Monday press conference, health officials said Tennessee has 12,000 staffed hospital beds, about 5,700 of which are currently occupied.
“They all have a surge capacity of just over 17,000 beds so we have plenty of capacity as it stands today,” Director of the COVID-19 Unified Command Stuart McWhorter said Monday.
The Tennessee Star reached out to the Tennessee Department of Health for the number of current COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state, but didn’t receive a response.
Other states, such as Minnesota, are providing information on both the cumulative and current number of hospitalizations. The Minnesota Department of Health notes that a total of 405 COVID-19 patients have been hospitalized, but only 177 are hospitalized as of today.
Tennessee saw its number of COVID-19 hospitalizations increase by 54 between Monday and Tuesday from 579 to 633. As of Tuesday, only 11 percent of cases required hospitalization.
The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s (IHME) coronavirus model predicts that Tennessee will reach peak resource use on April 16. According to IHME’s predictions, the state will need 632 hospital beds on that date and will have 7,812 beds available.
Tennessee now has 5,823 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 1,969 of which have recovered from the virus. As of Tuesday, the state had tested 78,831 individuals, meaning about seven percent of Tennesseans who are tested end up testing positive.
A total of 124 Tennesseans have died from the virus, about two percent of the total caseload.
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of The Minnesota Sun and The Ohio Star. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Possibly they do not want the citizenry to know that the shutdown of Tennessee has been a big mistake that has hurt more people than the virus ever will. Just a thought.