COVID patients died in crowded hospitals while ICU beds sat unused. Hantavirus could expose same flaw

The deaths from a hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship have set off an international scramble over the past month to trace hundreds of passengers. But the question we should be asking is not whether the hantavirus outbreak becomes the next pandemic. It is whether hospitals could be better prepared than they were in 2020 when COVID-19 struck. The answer, right now, is no.

During the height of the pandemic, more than 15,000 deaths from COVID could have been prevented in April 2020 if those patients had access to an ICU bed. Those beds existed. The patients were simply in the wrong hospital, invisible to the facilities drowning in patients nearby. And the tools to fix that invisibility already existed, too.

This problem is known as load imbalance: different hospitals in a region simultaneously at overcapacity and undercapacity with no systems to match patients to available resources. From July 2020 to March