The Countries With The Most Critical Care Beds Per Capita [Infographic]

As the world struggles to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus is already pushing Italy’s hospital capacity to breaking point. Last Friday, Italy had 4,636 confirmed cases of the illness and that has now risen to just under 12,500. In Lombardy, 5,791 people had contracted the virus by Tuesday, of which 446 were in intensive care units. Medical staff are reporting that the health system is approaching breaking point in some areas.

The deteriorating situation has raised serious questions about the level of critical care infrastructure across different countries, particularly that figure regarding ICU bed capacity. In mid-February, a study from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that while the vast majority of COVID-19 cases were mild up to that point, 13.8% were severe and 4.7% were critical. If the number of cases continues to climb at its current pace, intensive care units across the world will come under massive pressure.

In order to show where that pressure could be highest, the following infographic pulls together data from three different sources to show the number of critical care beds per 100,000 inhabitants in different countries. According to a paper published in the Intensive Care Medicine journal utilizing 2012 data, Italy had 12.5 ICU beds per 100,000 of its population that year while Germany had 29.2 ICU beds per 100,000 inhabitants. A different paper published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information in 2015 states that capacity in the United States is even higher at 34.2 ICU beds per 100,000 people.

In South Korea where a major testing push has led to a reduction in the rate of daily new infections, ICU bed capacity stood at 10.6 beds per 100,000 of the population in 2017. That’s according to an analysis published in the Critical Care Medicine journal in January of this year. It also found that the situation is worse in China and India where the number of critical care beds per 100,000 people stands at just 3.6 and 2.3 respectively.

*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)