COVID-19 Forecasts: Hospitalizations

Interpretation of Forecasts of New Hospitalizations

• This week, CDC received forecasts of daily, new reported COVID-19 hospital admissions over the next 4 weeks from 11 modeling groups.
• On the national level, the forecasts estimate that 6,800 to 28,000 new COVID-19 hospital admissions will be reported January 11, 2021.
• Reported hospital use data have recently been made available on HealthData.govexternal icon, with daily new confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions reported for each state. The forecast graphs presented here now include both the reported data and the forecasts.
• State-level forecasts also show a high degree of variability, which results from multiple factors. Hospital admissions forecasts use different sources of data for COVID-19 cases or deaths, with different limitations, and make different assumptions about social distancing.

National Forecasts

• The figure shows the number of new confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions reported nationally in the United States each day from October 5, 2020 to December 6, 2020 and the predicted number of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per day for the next 4 weeks, through January 11, 2021.
• The forecasts make different assumptions about hospitalization rates and levels of social distancing and other interventions and use different methods to estimate the number of new hospital admissions.

Download national forecast data excel icon[CSV – 1 sheet]

State Forecasts

State-level forecasts show the predicted number of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per day for the next 4 weeks by state. Each state uses a different scale, due to differences in the number of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per day in each state.

Download state forecasts pdf icon[PDF – 8 pages] ¹

Download all forecast data excel icon[CSV – 1 sheet]

Additional forecast data and information on forecast submission are available at the COVID-19 Forecast Hubexternal icon.

Forecast Assumptions

The forecasts make different assumptions about social distancing measures and use different methods and data sets to estimate the number of new hospital admissions. Additional individual models details are available here; https://github.com/cdcepi/COVID-19-Forecasts/blob/master/COVID-19_Forecast_Model_Descriptions.mdexternal icon.

Social distancing is incorporated into the forecasts in two different ways:

• These modeling groups make assumptions about how levels of social distancing will change in the future:
  • Columbia Universityexternal icon (Model: Columbia)
  • Covid-19 Simulator Consortiumexternal icon (Model: Covid19Sim)
  • Johns Hopkins University, Infectious Disease Dynamics Labexternal icon (Model: JHU-IDD)
  • Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluationexternal icon (Model: IHME)
  • University of California, Los Angelesexternal icon (Model: UCLA )
• These modeling groups assume that existing social distancing measures in each jurisdiction will continue through the projected 4-week time period:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing,external icon (Model: GT-DeepCOVID)
  • Google and Harvard School of Public Healthexternal icon (Model: Google-HSPH)
  • Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Labexternal icon (Model: JHU-APL)
  • Karlen Working Groupexternal icon (Model: Karlen)
  • Los Alamos National Laboratoryexternal icon (Model: LANL)
  • University of Southern Californiaexternal icon (Model: USC)

The rate of new hospital admissions is estimated using one of four approaches:

• These modeling groups assume that a certain fraction of infected people will be hospitalized:
  • Columbia Universityexternal icon
  • Covid-19 Simulator Consortiumexternal icon
  • Google and Harvard School of Public Healthexternal icon
  • Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Labexternal icon
  • Johns Hopkins University, Infectious Disease Dynamics Labexternal icon
  • Los Alamos National Laboratoryexternal icon
  • University of California, Los Angelesexternal icon
  • University of Southern Californiaexternal icon
• The Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing,external icon uses COVID-19 hospitalization data reported by some jurisdictions to forecast future hospitalizations.
• The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluationexternal icon estimates numbers of new hospitalizations based on numbers of forecasted deaths.
• The Karlen Working Groupexternal icon uses the rate of reported infections to estimate the number of new hospitalizations in a given jurisdiction, unless the rates of reported infections and hospitalizations differ. In that case, the rate of reported hospitalizations is used to forecast new hospitalizations.

Additional information on use of HHS reported hospital admissions for COVID-19 forecasts is available here: https://github.com/reichlab/covid19-forecast-hub/blob/master/data-processed/README.md#hospitalizationsexternal icon.

¹ The full range of the prediction intervals is not visible for all state plots. Please see the forecast data for the full range of state-specific prediction intervals.