A computational investigation of COVID-19 transmission inside hospital wards and associated costs

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemics has placed a particular burden on hospitals: from intra-hospital transmission of the infections, to reduced admissions of non-COVID-19 patients. There are also high costs associated with the treatment of hospitalised COVID-19 patients, as well as reductions in revenues due to delayed and cancelled treatments. In this study we investigate computationally the trans-mission of COVID-19 inside a hospital ward that contains multiple-bed bays (with 4 or 6 beds) and multiple single-bed side rooms (that can accommodate the contacts of COVID-19-positive patients).The aim is to investigate the role of 4-bed bays vs. 6-bed bays on the spread of infections and the hospital costs. We show that 4-bed bays are associated with lower infections only when we reduce the discharge time of some patients from 10 days to 5 days. This also leads to lower costs for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. In contrast, 6-bed bays are associated with reduced hospital waiting lists (especially when there are also multiple side rooms available to accommodate the contacts ofCOVID-19-positive patients identified inside 6-bed bays).

Rights

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).

Cite as

Downloadable citations

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.3934/mbe.2022306

Repository URI

https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/publications/10faa38d-4af1-4541-8db4-00f30305e204