A Simulation Model and Dashboard for Predicting Covid-19 Bed Requirements

The Covid-19 pandemic has placed extraordinary amounts of stress upon public hospitals globally. This paper describes a simulation model for estimating hospital bed demand based on generated scenarios. Statistical tools were also developed for generating these scenarios, in particular, for fitting distributions to patients' lengths-of-stay and for predicting the number of daily arrivals of Covid-19 patients. A web dashboard has been created for ease of use. The simulation model and statistical tools have been used to estimate Covid-related bed demand at an NHS hospital in the East of England.