Abstract
Our ability to respond to COVID-19 depends on our health systems’ capacity to serve people that are sick. And it depends on everyone’s efforts to keep the number of sick people as low as possible. The fewer sick people there are at any given time, the better our health system can care for us. Southern New Jersey’s health systems serve people of all ages from rural to urban areas. Effective response to the spread of COVID-19 is contingent on many factors within our counties (Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Ocean, Salem). The Senator Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs and the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Rutgers University-Camden in collaboration with New Jersey Health Initiatives explored the potential spread of COVID-19 relative to hospital capacity in southern New Jersey.