Experts fear a flood of patients will hit once testings are made more available.
U.S. hospitals are setting up circus-like 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 open up, or could be required to share rooms with others infected.
Some doctors fear 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,” warned Dr. William Jaquis, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
The United States is still facing an active flu season, and many hospitals are already running at capacity caring for those patients.
The new virus will only add to that burden, said Dr. Bruce Ribner an infectiousdisease specialist at Emory University’s medical school.
To keep suspected coronavirus patients from mingling with others in the ER, the Central Maine
Medical Center in Lewiston, Maine, set up a tent in the parking lot where people with respiratory symptoms are diverted for testing.
Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, South Carolina, did 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, UW Medicine set up drive-thru testing in a hospital parking garage and has screened hundreds of staff members, faculty and trainees, with nurses reaching through car windows and using swabs to collect specimens from people’s nostrils.
Drive-thru testing is expected to be offered to patients as soon as Monday.
At Spectrum Health Gerber
Memorial Hospital in Fremont, Michigan, Robert Davidson, an emergency medicine doctor, said hip and knee replacement surgery and other operations that aren’t emergencies will be postponed if a coronavirus case is diagnosed in the area.
Authorities in Illinois and New York state are talking about doing the same.
At Blue Ridge Regional Hospital in the small mountain community of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, respirator masks are locked and under video surveillance.
“We’ve really got to expect that this is going to be bad,” said Blue Ridge Regional’s Dr. Gabriel Cade.
In New York state, hit by the largest U.S. cluster of cases, the Health Department is accelerating regulations to get nursing students certified to work more quickly and is asking retired doctors and nurses to offer their services, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
This week, the American Hospital Association, American Medical Association and American Nurses Association asked for a presidential emergency declaration that would allow doctors and nurses to work across state lines and would waive certain rules to free up hospital beds.
Similar declarations were issued during Hurricane Katrina and the swine flu outbreak.
President Donald Trump made the declaration Friday.
How bad U.S. hospitals will be hit is unclear, in part because bungling on the part of the government in ramping up widespread testing for the virus has left public health officials uncertain as to how many people are infected.
Officially, the number of those infected in the United States was put at around 1,300 Friday, with at least 41 deaths.
Experts fear that when the problems with testing are resolved, a flood of patients will hit the nation’s emergency rooms.
But that will also give health authorities a clearer picture of the outbreak.