ROCKFORD — Hospitals in Winnebago County are using a simple mathematical formula to predict how many additional beds they'll need to treat all those who may require hospitalization for COVID-19, the potentially fatal respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

Winnebago County Health Department Director Sandra Martell said Tuesday that hospitals here have all the beds, staff and equipment they need to treat all patients, at least for now.

She and a team consisting of health department employees, elected officials, first responders and hospital representatives are meeting daily at a downtown Emergency Operations Center to determine how much additional hospital bed capacity Winnebago County will need to respond to the global pandemic. The concern is that if the virus spreads rapidly enough throughout the county, there could be more COVID-19 patients who need inpatient care than there are hospital beds.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said in recent days that 40% to 80% of his state's population may become infected by coronavirus. In Rockford, the daily conversation at the EOC has zeroed in on two data points, said County Board Chairman Frank Haney: 20% of people infected with the virus may need some level of hospitalization and 5% of those infected will require critical care or treatment in an intensive care unit.

That means Winnebago County would need 5,700 ICU beds if that formula were applied here, assuming that 40% of the county's roughly 285,000 people contract the virus. Yet the county is home to four hospitals that combine for fewer than 900 licensed beds, and only 98 of those are ICU beds, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

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“This is certainly something that we've been asking from the very beginning: How can we make sure that we have the beds we need?” said Dr. Mike Polizzotto, chief medical officer at SwedishAmerican.

“At every hospital you have more general beds than critical care or ICU beds,” said Polizzotto, a board certified family physician. “That's true here at Swedes. We have 323 licensed beds. At hospitals in this area and around the country, ICU beds are roughly 10% of your general beds.

“I would tell you that at Swedes, we have not said: 'This is the number of beds we're aiming for.' What we're saying is let's prepare for the worst and have as many beds available as we can possibly imagine.”

It's difficult to determine the demand for beds because people get sick at different times, and they don't all require hospitalization. Additionally, it's important to remember that the number of “staffed beds” at a hospital is more important than the number of licensed beds, Polizzotto said. SwedishAmerican is licensed for 323 beds, but “we do not routinely staff for that number of beds ordinarily,” he said.

Polizzotto said he uses the terms "beds" and "bed capacity” as catch-all terms for hospital beds, medical staff and personal protective equipment – the three essentials hospitals must have plenty of to avoid being overwhelmed by large numbers of patients requiring hospitalization. SwedishAmerican Medical Center-Belvidere has an additional 30 beds that the Rockford hospital can use if needed, Polizzotto said.

Abandoning elective medical procedures during the past week or so in an effort to conserve hospital staff and personal protective equipment seems to be helping at SwedishAmerican, Polizzotto said, as visits to the hospital's emergency department have dropped by a third. The hospital's inpatient census has declined, too, he said.

The East State Street hospital has even completed “some construction modifications” to add 10 more negative pressure rooms, he said. Hospitals use negative pressure rooms to contain airborne contaminants within the room. That's critical when dealing with a microbe like the coronavirus, particularly in a hospital setting, where immune-compromised patients, newborns and the elderly are more vulnerable to airborne infections than others.

“One of the things we are thinking of is that if we did have a number of patients who we knew to be positive for coronavirus, we could put them all in one room to prevent the spread to other populations in the hospital,” Polizzotto said.

For now, hospitals in Winnebago County are able to accept and care for patients, Martell said in a written statement on Tuesday.

Haney, who is involved in daily meetings at the Emergency Operations Center, said public officials and hospital leaders must “be honest to the point of being blunt” when discussing the community's hospital bed capacity because our response to the pandemic “is not a fire drill or political game.”

“The problem arises when a large number of people in a community get sick at one time versus spread out over a longer period of time,” Haney said. “That is why we need people to do the things that slow the spread like staying apart by 6 feet, staying home, and washing your hands.

“This is no different than the message you are hearing from officials at the state and national levels as well as in other countries,” he said. “We have an excellent health care apparatus here in our community. But we do need to execute the flatten-the-curve' strategy.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker again on Tuesday emphasized the need for aggressive measures such as the stay-at-home order he issued last week to “flatten the curve,” the term public health officials have used to describe slowing the spread of the virus. He said state health systems would be pushed beyond capacity without protective measures.

“In our worst-case scenario projections, that is without the stay-at-home order, in one week we would need over 2,500 more non-ICU beds and 800 ICU beds than we have in existence in the entire state today,” Pritzker said during his daily press briefing in Chicago. “In two weeks we would need over 28,000 non-ICU beds and over 9,400 ICU beds. That’s untenable.”

Statewide, nearly 52% of hospital beds and 57% of intensive care beds are occupied, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. More than 28% of ventilators are in use, the agency said.

Pritzker said the protective measures the state has put in place — closing schools, telling people to stay at home, and limiting the size of gatherings — will help flatten the curve. He also said the state is working to increase the capacity of hospitals in the state by putting offline hospitals and hotels to use for medical care.

“I will continue to pound the table to get the federal government to acquire the supplies that our states so critically need and to allocate them appropriately — lives depend on it,” Pritzker said.

“The question that everyone wants answered right now is how long is all of this going to last. The honest answer is we don’t yet know,” Pritzker said. “I understand how difficult it is to see the economy slow down and watch friends and neighbors laid off from jobs. Those concerns keep me up at night, too. But I will say again, you can’t have a livelihood without a life. ... We can revive our economy. We can’t revive the people that are lost to this virus.”

Staff writer Kevin Haas contributed to this report.

Isaac Guerrero: iguerrero@rrstar.com; @isaac_rrs