Hard-pressed hospitals brace for ‘tremendous strain’
US hospitals are setting up triage tents, calling doctors out of retirement, guarding their supplies of face masks and making plans to cancel elective surgery as they brace for an expected onslaught of coronavirus patients.
Depending on how bad the crisis gets, the sick could find themselves waiting on stretchers in emergency room hallways for hospital beds to become free, or could be required to share rooms with others who are infected. Some doctors fear that hospitals could become so overwhelmed that they could be forced to ration medical care.
‘‘This is going to be a fairly tremendous strain on our health system,’’ said Dr William Jaquis, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
The US is still facing an active flu season, and many hospitals are already running at capacity caring for those patients.
Government health authorities are taking emergency steps to waive laws and regulations to help hospitals deal with the crisis. Hospitals are also getting ready.
To keep suspected coronavirus patients from mingling with others, the Central Maine Medical Centre in Lewiston, Maine has set up a tent in the carpark, where people with respiratory symptoms are diverted for testing. Lexington Medical Centre in West Columbia, South Carolina has done the same outside its emergency room.
In Seattle, hit by the nation’s biggest cluster of coronavirus deaths, most of them at a suburban nursing home, the University of Washington Medical Centre has set up drive-through testing in a hospital parking garage and has screened hundreds of staff and students.
Dr Raj Govindaiah, chief medical officer for Memorial Health System, which runs hospitals in Illinois, said they were hiding the free surgical masks usually offered to visitors in the lobby, so that doctors and nurses could use them instead if supplies became tight.
At Blue Ridge Regional Hospital in the small mountain community of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, masks are locked away and under video surveillance.
In New York state, hit by the largest US cluster of cases, the
Health Department is speeding up work to get nursing students certified so they can begin working sooner, and is asking retired doctors and nurses to offer their services.
How badly US hospitals will be hit is unclear, in part because mistakes by the government in ramping up testing have left public health officials uncertain about how many people are infected. By some estimates, it could be at least 14,000.
Experts fear that when the problems with testing are resolved, a flood of patients will hit the nation’s ERs. But largescale testing will also give health authorities a clearer picture of the outbreak, enabling them to allocate resources where they are needed.
In hard-hit Italy, doctors have been forced to make agonising decisions about which critically ill patients receive care. Doctors fear that this could happen in the US, too.