Add a hospital state and estimate the enlarged Q-matrix from the cohort. If infection starts in state , the expected hospital occupancy generated by one infection is the Markov reward model integral
Equivalently, if is the subgenerator on all transient states, is the entry of the fundamental matrix of an absorbing continuous-time Markov chain . The number infected in the population has expectation , so linearity of expectation gives total expected hospital use days. If only occupancy within a finite period counts, replace the upper integration limit by the remaining follow-up time for each infection and average over infection times.