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 12 modeling groups that were included in the ensemble forecasts.
• This week’s national ensemble predicts a likely increase in number of daily new confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions, with 14,000 to 25,000 new confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions reported February 8, 2021.
• The state- and territory-level ensemble forecasts predict that over the next 4 weeks, the number of daily confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions will likely increase in 8 jurisdictions and decrease in 4 jurisdictions, which are indicated in the forecast plots below. Trends in numbers of future reported hospital admissions are uncertain or predicted to remain stable in the other states and territories.
• In previous weeks, all submitted forecasts were displayed, even if they were not included in the ensemble forecasts. Starting this week, only forecasts meeting a set of inclusion criteria are shown for jurisdictions with ensemble forecasts. Further details are available here: https://covid19forecasthub.org/doc/ensemble/external icon.

National Forecasts

• The figure shows the number of new confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions reported nationally in the United States each day from November 3, 2020 to January 4, 2021 and the predicted number of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per day for the next 4 weeks, for January 11, 2021 through February 8, 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. See model descriptions below for details.

Download national forecast data excel icon[XLSX – 22 KB]

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[2 MB, 14 pages] ¹

Download all forecast data excel icon[CSV, 1 MB]

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.

Reported daily new hospital admissions can vary due to variable staffing and inconsistent reporting patterns within the week. Thus, daily variations in the reported numbers and the forecasts may not fully represent the true number of confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions in each jurisdiction on a specific day. 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.

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)
  • 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)
  • Northeastern University, Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systemexternal icon (Model: MOBS)
  • University of California, Santa Barbaraexternal icon (Model: UCSB)
  • University of Southern Californiaexternal icon (Model: USC)
• 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

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.