Fig. 3: Projected demand and shortage of hospital beds and ICUs when adopting individual mitigation strategies in China under optimistic VE scenario from March 2022 to September 2022.
a, Daily demand of hospital (non-ICU) beds. b, Daily demand of ICU beds. In b, the green dashed line indicates the number of ICU beds available in China, and the inset plot shows days of shortage of ICU beds as a function of the number of insufficient ICU beds compared with the capacity of ICU beds. The curves in the inset are smoothed by B-spline with 8 d.f. The scenarios included in legend are as follows: subunit vaccines refer to using a third dose of subunit vaccines as booster after two doses of inactivated vaccines as priming. Vaccinating elderly refers to vaccinating approximately 52 million people aged ≥60 years who have not yet been vaccinated as of 17 March 2022. 50% uptake and 80% efficacy corresponds to a scenario where 50% of symptomatic cases receive an antiviral therapy with an efficacy of 80% in preventing hospitalization and death. 100% uptake and 89% efficacy corresponds to a scenario where all symptomatic cases receive an antiviral therapy with an efficacy of 89% in preventing hospitalization and death. School and workplace closure corresponds to a scenario where, on the top of baseline strategy, all schools and workplaces remain closed for the duration of the epidemic. Rt: 3.0 and 2.0 correspond to scenarios assuming different levels of NPIs leading to reduced values of the reproduction number. Note that no strict NPI is implemented in the baseline scenario. Data are presented as median with 2.5% and 97.5% quantiles of n = 200 simulations.
