sturg, if you are interested I took a closer look at some of the "the models are wrong, see the hospitalization rates" truthing that's going on. I was, selfishly, most interested in the numbers for NY. Looks like while the IMHE model
did drastically reduce the projected hospitalizations there, I'm not convinced it wasn't just because, as thethe likes to point out, the logistics of NY are different. Frankly, it makes me
more concerned for NY, not less.
The whole model is based extrapolation hospital resource usage from death numbers, since that is basically the closest thing to solid data. So the ratio between Hospitalization

eath is the key component of the hospitalization number. So here is what
the revised IMHE report says about those hospitalization ratios:
In previous releases of our estimates, our ratios were informed by a CDC report with information on early COVID-19 cases in the US – from February 12 to March 16 – and those patients’ outcomes. Based on these data (509 admissions divided by 46 deaths), our overall ratio was 11.1 hospital admissions per COVID-19 death.
Basically, they were using the limited nationwide data available and applying it uniformly to the states. As better data came in they were able to create state-by-state ratios that revealed that the Hosp

eath ratio was varying wildly by state:
So NY has by far the lowest ratio in the nation at 4.22 (looks like it is closer to 5:1 now, based on the
NYC data page). What does that mean? Of the top of my head, it seems like there are two explanations for this disparity between NY and CA (or even the mean).
1) NY is doing a much worse job keeping people alive (numerator)
2) NY is turning away people that they previously, or other states, would have hospitalized (denominator)
Frankly, both options are
bad for NY. Both are probably happening to some degree, but I think #2 is the real kicker: hospitals here are triaging and sending people home that would in normal times be given beds because they need to focus on the most severe cases.
I personally know of someone in GA, another place with a below mean ratio, who claim to have been seriously sick (>102 for 2 weeks, lost 20 pounds) and were essentially turned out because they needed room for sicker people; he definitely seemed like someone that would have been hospitalized before. tapate probably has a better take on what's going on in GA, though, so I would defer to his observations there over my anecdotes.
But for NY, this seems to be exactly what is happening. Here is one post in a very good twitter thread from a NY ER doc:
[tw]1248837617996763136[/tw]
The takeaway is that the hospitalization projections for NY fell not because everything got better, or was never bad to begin with, (though maybe some things did get better, and maybe some things weren't as bad!), but it looks like some people who would in normal times be admitted are being sent home as "not quite bad enough" cases.
The causal link is
not: Lower hospitalization -> Lower death.
The
real link is: More severe outbreak -> Lower Hosp

eath ratio
Hope this was interesting to someone else. It was to me, at least.