'Secret’ Ohio COVID-19 Model Was Off by 700 Percent

As recently as March 29, the Ohio Department of Health’s forecast was predicting that the coronavirus pandemic would reach its peak in the state on April 19 when 10,000 new cases would be reported, The Ohio Star said.

Under that prediction, Ohio’s model was off by 8,683. The Ohio Department of Health said Monday that 1,317 new cases were reported between Sunday and Monday.

Ohio’s coronavirus model was changed at some point to predict 1,607 new cases for Sunday’s peak. Even under that projection, the model was still off by 290 cases.

Between Sunday and Monday, Ohio’s confirmed caseload increased from 11,602 to 12,919.

For Saturday, the day before the projected peak, the model predicted 1,600 new cases in Ohio. In actuality, the state saw 1,380 new cases reported Saturday, meaning the model was off by 220 cases. The model was previously projecting well over 9,000 new cases for Saturday.

The Ohio Department of Health releases new data daily at 2 p.m., so the data released Monday provides a picture of what happened on Sunday, the day of the peak.

Department of Health Director Amy Acton and Gov. Mike DeWine previously estimated that Ohio would need roughly three-times its normal hospital capacity for Sunday’s coronavirus peak. DeWine said on April 1 that “in about two weeks” Ohio would “start seeing it very hard in our hospital admissions.”

Between Sunday and Monday, Ohio reported 88 new hospitalizations, 33 new ICU admissions, and 38 deaths. The Department of Health says 90,839 Ohioans have been tested for the virus as of Monday.

A model from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) thinks that Ohio has already passed both its peak resource use and peak in daily deaths. The IHME says that Ohio reached peak resource use on April 15, when the state needed 1,230 hospital beds and had 14,290 beds available.

Overall, the IHME model predicts that Ohio will have 716 COVID-19 deaths over a four month period.