A queuing model for ventilator capacity management during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We applied a queuing model to inform ventilator capacity planning during the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada. The core of our framework is a multi-class Erlang loss model that represents ventilator use by both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients. Input for the model includes COVID-19 case projections, and our analysis incorporates projections with different levels of transmission due to public health measures and social distancing.