I was looking through a hospital's list of standard charges when I saw a whole section dedicated to uninsured COVID patients. And one charge was devastating.
The cost of more than 4 days on a ventilator: $120,000.
We have all heard so many stories, whether personal or on the news, about patients being put ventilators for weeks at a time. This made me wonder, how much was all of this costing those who become hospitalized with COVID? Using BeautifulSoup and Selenium I scraped over 5,000 campaigns from GoFundMe and narrowed that selection down to 3,500 that I am pretty confident are related to people who have been diagnosed with the disease.
Using regex, I found 159 mentions of days, months or weeks spent in the hospital.
COVID patients had a median hospital stay of 21 days
Distribution of number of days in the hospital reported in COVID-19 related GoFundMe campaigns
30 campaigns
20
Six people reported
hospital stays of
around four months
10
The longest stay
reported was
nine months
0
0
40
80
120
160
200
240
280 days
Source: 3,500+ campaigns scraped from GoFundMe in February 2022. Using regex found 157 posts that mentioned
“days/weeks/months” in the hospital. Credit: Shelby Jouppi
COVID patients had a median
hospital stay of 21 days, but many
stayed much longer
number of campaigns
40
days
80
Six people reported hospital stays
of around four months.
Most were on ventilators and some
in medically-induced comas.
120
160
200
240
One man in upstate New York reported
a 9-month hospital stay after having
a severe case of COVID and a stroke
280
days
Source: 3,500+ campaigns scraped from GoFundMe in February 2022.
Using regex found 157 posts that mentioned “days/weeks/months” in
the hospital. Credit: Shelby Jouppi
There are thousands of people behind these stories, and their stories are just a fraction of what people around the nation have experienced. I wanted to find a way to display the sentiment of these stories. Using NLTK, I extracted two-word phrases from the descriptions.