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cdc.gov - Volume 21, Number 7—July 2015
Rainisch G, Asher J, George D, Clay M, Smith TL, Cosmos K, et al. Estimating Ebola treatment needs, United States [letter]. Emerg Infect Dis. 2015 Jul - DOI: 10.3201/eid2107.150286
http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid2107.150286
To the Editor: By December 31, 2014, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa had resulted in treatment of 10 Ebola case-patients in the United States; a maximum of 4 patients received treatment at any one time (1). Four of these 10 persons became clinically ill in the United States (2 infected outside the United States and 2 infected in the United States), and 6 were clinically ill persons medically evacuated from West Africa (Technical Appendix 1[PDF - 228 KB - 8 pages] Table 6).
To plan for possible future cases in the United States, policy makers requested we produce a tool to estimate future numbers of Ebola case-patients needing treatment at any one time in the United States. Gomes et al. previously estimated the potential size of outbreaks in the United States and other countries for 2 different dates in September 2014 (2). Another study considered the overall risk for exportation of Ebola from West Africa but did not estimate the number of potential cases in the United States at any one time (3).
We provide for practicing public health officials a spreadsheet-based tool, Beds for Ebola Disease (BED) (Technical Appendix 2[PDF - 228 KB - 8 pages]) that can be used to estimate the number of Ebola patients expected to be treated simultaneously in the United States at any point in time. Users of BED can update estimates for changing conditions and improved quality of input data, such as incidence of disease. The BED tool extends the work of prior studies by dividing persons arriving from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea into the following 3 categories: 1) travelers who are not health care workers (HCWs), 2) HCWs, and 3) medical evacuees. This categorization helps public health officials assess the potential risk for Ebola virus infection in individual travelers and the subsequent need for post-arrival monitoring (4).
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