Colorado hospitals can turn away patients as state grapples with surge

Colorado’s governor said hospitals can turn away new admissions as they deal with a surge of covid-19 cases that has strained the state’s hospitals.

Gov. Jared Polis, D, signed an executive order over the weekend authorizing the state’s public health department to determine whether hospitals or emergency departments are at or will soon hit capacity. The department can order such facilities to halt admissions and redirect or transfer patients, according to the order, which will be in effect for 30 days starting Sunday.

The move highlights the continued trouble parts of the country face, even as numbers at the national level suggest that the delta-variant-driven surge that swamped emergency rooms this summer and fall has started to ebb. Officials say the state’s staffing shortages are also contributing to the burden from rising cases, and one bioethicist said the upward trend is particularly troubling without actions that can help bring numbers back down.

Right now there are “two Colorados,” said Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

“If you’re in the healthcare system, if you’re a patient needing services in a hospital or if you’re a medical practitioner, things are really bad,” he said. “But if you’re a regular citizen just walking around on the street, you wouldn’t know it. People are behaving as though things are normal.”

The governor said at a briefing last week that he was recently asked whether the pandemic is “over.”

“When we have 1,100 people in the hospital, the answer is no, it’s not,” he said.

In a separate Sunday order, the governor said that “despite significant progress, there has been an increase in COVID-19 cases, largely due to the highly contagious Delta variant and the 20% of Coloradans who have yet to get the highly effective, safe vaccine.”

He said the state’s “severe staffing shortage,” combined with the case surge, has forced officials to “undertake targeted efforts to respond and mitigate the effects of the pandemic, prevent further spread, preserve our health care resources, and provide needed flexibility to address the collateral consequences of the pandemic.”

Officials said the way the pandemic peaks have fluctuated across the country may contribute to why Colorado is seeing an influx now. Wynia, who helped Colorado write its crisis standards of care early in the pandemic, said even as the state has done “fairly well” with vaccination rates, it may be seeing escalating numbers now because it hasn’t experienced the major surges that beset other states.