NATIONWIDE — Are the hospitals in your area able to withstand a COVID-19 outbreak?

Data models compiled by a Harvard group show what hospitals could be in for, depending on the severity of an outbreak over the next 18 months, if they make no changes to capacity. 

The Harvard Global Health Institute created the data models to show how many beds exist in 306 Hospital Referring Regions — markets where people generally go to the same hospitals.

They also projected the number of individuals who could be sickened by the virus, hospitalized or put into ICU over the course of the virus, and what that might do to hospitals, depending on how quickly the virus spread, and depending on the size of the population that becomes infected. 

The group says the data is meant to give the hospitals and local and state governments a better understanding of how quickly they could be overwhelmed if steps were not taken quickly to expand capacity.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

To do that, some places have opened mobile hospital units or turned hotels or other now-empty buildings into units. The U.S. Navy has also sent two Mercy-class ships to the west and east coasts of the country to serve as hospital ships, including the USNS Mercy, which arrived in the Port of Los Angeles on Friday.

In the infographic below, we broke down some of the basic data to give you a sense of how many hospital beds are in your area and what the infection projections would be if 20 percent of the population got sick from COVID-19.  

To see the more extensive data analysis, head to the Harvard Global Health Institute website.