Webinar by Lucas Lacasa

As the number of cases of COVID-19 continues to grow, local health services across different countries are at risk of being overwhelmed with patients requiring intensive care. At the same time, surges and demand are not homogeneous across a country, as different regions see incidence grow or decline in an asynchronous way. This enables the possibility of balancing demand by sharing patients. In this talk I will describe a proposal that we put forward in late March 2020 during the first wave of COVID-19, which computes quasi-optimal re-routing strategies to either transfer patients requiring Intensive Care Units (ICU) or ventilators, constrained by feasibility of transfer. The method is general and applicable regionally or at a national level. I will give the details of the method and showcase it with realistic data from the United Kingdom and Spain. Depending on different ICU demand profiles, up to 1000 patients (per algorithm step) which would otherwise not receive care could be re-allocated without the needs of increasing capacity of the hospitals. I will also briefly discuss our experience in going from the scientific idea to the operationalised platform.