European Hospital Bed Capacity Compared

Europe is battling against a second wave of the coronavirus and that has seen some of its biggest economies reinstate their national lockdowns. People in France will only be allowed to leave their homes for essential reasons from Friday while Germany will impose less severe measures from Monday.

As the number of hospitalisations and deaths mount across the continent, which health systems are best equipped to deal with a surge of patients? According to data released by Eurostat in July, Germany had the most hospital beds per 100,000 inhabitants of any European country in 2018 with 800 (Germany's total here dates from 2017).

Elsewhere, neighbouring France had 591 available hospital beds per 100,000 of the population in 2018 while Italy had 314. The figure is considerably lower in the United Kingdom at just 250. Surprisingly, perhaps, Sweden had the lowest number of hospital beds out of all countries in the dataset with just 214.