COLUMBUS, Ohio — More hospital beds are available to treat COVID-19 patients in almost every major Ohio city than the week before, according to the latest data released by the Ohio Department of Health.
Each week, Spectrum News 1 speaks with Eye on Ohio: Ohio Center for Journalism about the latest hospital bed data. The organization collects the data from the state health department and looks for possible trends.
The latest data was reported to Eye on Ohio on April 23. The data shows 2,102 available Med/Surg beds. The beds are occupied by the average patient hospitalized for COVID-19. The data also shows 537 intensive care unit beds were available on the same day.
These numbers are an increase from the week before. The Ohio Department of Health reported 1,878 available Med/Surg beds and only 461 available ICU beds on April 16.
Lucia Walinchus is the executive director for Eye On Ohio. She said the data shows hospital capacity improved in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo and Dayton, but there was no improvement in Akron.
"Akron is a smaller area anyway. They never had very many (beds) to begin with, so percentage-wise, it's not really as dire. Just looking at this trend overall, we see this huge decrease in the number of beds because of the increase in coronavirus and then we saw the vaccines and that went down quite a bit and our hospital capacity rose quite a bit," Walinchus said. "Now as things started to open up a bit more, we did see a little bit of a rebound, which we expected to see eventually and it now seems that we've sort of plateaued at that rebound."
On April 23, the state reported 20 available Med/Surg beds. There were 22 available on April 16.
Click here to view the latest data from Eye on Ohio.