COVID-19 Forecasts: Hospitalizations

Reported and forecasted new COVID-19 hospital admissions as of July 26, 2021.

Interpretation of Forecasts of New Hospitalizations

• This week, ensemble forecasts of new reported COVID-19 hospital admissions over the next 4 weeks included forecasts from 10 modeling groups, each of which contributed a forecast for at least one jurisdiction.
• This week’s national ensemble predicts that the number of new daily confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions will likely increase over the next 4 weeks, with 4,800 to 20,000 new confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions likely reported on August 23, 2021.
• The state- and territory-level ensemble forecasts predict that over the next 4 weeks, the number of daily confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions will likely increase in 34 jurisdictions, which are indicated in the forecast plots below. Trends in numbers of future reported hospital admissions are uncertain or predicted to remain stable in the other states and territories.

National Forecasts

• The figure shows the number of new confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions reported in the United States each day from May 18 through July 19 and forecasted new COVID-19 hospital admissions per day over the next 4 weeks, through August 23.
• Models make various assumptions about the levels of social distancing and other interventions, which may not reflect recent changes in behavior. See model descriptions below for details on the assumptions and methods used to produce the forecasts.

Download national forecast data excel icon[XLS – 32 KB]

State Forecasts

State-level forecasts show the predicted number of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per day for the next 4 weeks by state. Each state forecast figure uses a different scale due to differences in the number of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per day between states and only forecasts meeting a set of ensemble inclusion criteria are shown. Further details are available here: https://covid19forecasthub.org/doc/ensemble/external icon. Plots of the state-level ensemble forecasts and the underlying data can be downloaded below.

Download state forecasts pdf icon[2 MB, 14 pages]

Download all forecast data excel icon[CSV – 1 MB]

Additional forecast data and information on forecast submission are available at the COVID-19 Forecast Hubexternal icon.

Forecast Inclusion and Assumptions

The teams with forecasts included in the ensembles are displayed below. Forecasts are included when they meet a set of submission and data quality requirements, further described here: https://github.com/reichlab/covid19-forecast-hub#ensemble-modelexternal icon.

Reported daily new hospital admissions can vary due to variable staffing and inconsistent reporting patterns within the week. Thus, daily variations in the reported numbers and the forecasts may not fully represent the true number of confirmed COVID-19 hospital admissions in each jurisdiction on a specific day. Additional information on use of HHS-reported hospital admissions for COVID-19 forecasts is available here: https://github.com/reichlab/covid19-forecast-hub/blob/master/data-processed/README.md#hospitalizationsexternal icon.

The forecasts make different assumptions about social distancing measures and use different methods and data sets to estimate the number of new hospital admissions. Additional individual model details are available here: https://github.com/cdcepi/COVID-19-Forecasts/blob/master/COVID-19_Forecast_Model_Descriptions.mdexternal icon.

Intervention assumptions fall into multiple categories:

• These modeling groups make assumptions about how levels of social distancing will change in the future:
  • Columbia Universityexternal icon (Model: Columbia)
  • Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluationexternal icon (Model: IHME)
• These modeling groups assume that existing social distancing measures in each jurisdiction will continue through the projected 4-week time period:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computingexternal icon (Model: GT-DeepCOVID)
  • Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Labexternal icon (Model: JHU-APL)
  • Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Lab (Model: Gecko)
  • Johns Hopkins University, Infectious Disease Dynamics Labexternal icon (Model: JHU-IDD)
  • Karlen Working Groupexternal icon (Model: Karlen)
  • Los Alamos National Laboratoryexternal icon (Model: LANL)
  • Northeastern University, Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systemsexternal icon (Model: MOBS)
  • University of Southern Californiaexternal icon (Model: USC)

¹ The full range of the prediction intervals is not visible for all state plots. Please see the forecast data for the full range of state-specific prediction intervals.