Early March 2020, doctors in the affected regions of Italy described a situation in which ca 10% of patients with COVID-19 required intensive care [7] and media sources reported that hospitals and intensive care units in these regions had already reached their maximum capacity [8=13]. Data on admission of COVID-19 cases in a hospital and/or an intensive care unit are currently available at EU/EEA level for only 6% and 1% cases, respectively (data not shown). They should, however, be collected in a systematic fashion to complement current surveillance data that focus on the number of reported cases and the number of deaths. A study performed in 2010–11 showed a large variation in the availability of intensive care and intermediate care beds in Europe, ranging from 29.2 in Germany to 4.2 beds per 100,000 population in Portugal [14]. This means that countries may have more or less resources than Italy (12.5 intensive care and intermediate care beds per 100,000 population in 2010–11). Modelling scenarios related to healthcare capacity saturation, with estimates for each EU/EEA country and the UK of the prevalence of hospitalised COVID-19 cases associated with a > 90% risk of exceeding intensive care bed capacity, are provided in the sixth update of the ECDC rapid risk assessment on COVID-19 [1]. Since cases have so far clustered in certain regions in EU/EEA countries and the UK, and hospitals and intensive care units usually serve a defined regional catchment population, information about cases and intensive care beds should preferably be made available at the Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics 2 (NUTS-2) level.