  Objectives. Public health officials need tools to assist with anticipating
the healthcare resources required to confront the SARS-COV-2 pandemic. We built
a modeling tool to aid practicing public health officials with estimating
healthcare demand from the pandemic in their jurisdictions and to evaluate the
potential impacts of population-wide social-distancing interventions. Methods.
The tool uses a SEIR compartmental model to project the local spread of the
pandemic. Users input case counts, healthcare resources, and select
intervention strategies to evaluate. Outputs include the number of infections
and deaths with and without intervention, and the demand for hospital and
critical care beds and ventilators relative to existing capacity. We illustrate
the tool using data from three regions of Chile. Results. Our scenarios
indicate a surge in COVID-19 patients could overwhelm Chilean hospitals by
June, peaking in July or August at 6 to 50 times the current supply of beds and
ventilators. A lockdown strategy or combination of case isolation, home
quarantine, social distancing of individuals greater than 70 years, and
telework interventions may keep treatment demand below capacity. Conclusions.
Aggressive interventions can avert substantial morbidity and mortality from
COVID-19. Our tool permits rapid evaluation of locally-applicable policy
scenarios and updating of results as new data become available.
