The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
COVID-19 patients push U.S. hospitals to brink
Rising number of cases tests limits of smaller facilities.
WEST ALLIS, WIS. — A hospital in Idaho is 99% full and warning that it may have to transfer coronavirus patients to hospitals in Seattle and Portland, Ore. Medical centers in Kansas City, Mo., turned away ambulances on a recent day because they had no room for more patients. And in West Allis, just outside Milwaukee, an emergency fifield hospital erected on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Fair admitted its fifirst virus patient this week.
More than 41,000 people are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus in the United States, a 40% rise in the past month, and cooler weather that pushes more people indoors is threatening to expand the outbreak. At least 14 states saw more people hospitalized for the virus on a day in the past week than on any other day in the pandemic, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Seven more states are nearing their peaks.
The nation has seen more people hospitalized at earlier points — during an onslaught of cases in New York City in April and in the Sun Belt in July — but the sharply rising numbers now are deeply worrisome, in part, because they are testing the limits of smaller hospital systems.
Patients are now spread more broadly across the country, with troubling hot spots from North Dakota to Kentucky. More people than ever are falling critically ill in rural areas, particularly in the Midwest and the Mountain West, where theymust rely on hospitals that may have only a handful of beds. And experts worry that the growing numbers in need of hospital care will only get worse.
“I don’t really see any signs that things are slowing down and that concerns me a lot,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. “It has to be our starting premise that it’s not going to slow down unless we force it to slow down.”
Even as hospitalizations and known cases of the virus have grown, daily deaths across the country have remained fairly steady at around 760 in recent days. But some experts fear that the rate of deaths is beginning to rise again. Upticks in deaths usually lag behind rises in cases and hospitalizations because of the time it takes for the virus to progress.
For families around the country, the mounting hospitalizations were frightening — and personal.
The signs of a crunch for hospital space were painfully clear across several states.
“Make no mistake about this, this is an urgent crisis,” Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin said Thursday of the state’s outbreak.
In months past, field hospitals have opened in several cities, including Seattle and New York. Some closed after seeing only small numbers of patients, or none at all. But in Wisconsin, the health secretary-designee, Andrea Palm, said hospital offifficials had sounded an “urgent call” as more patients arrived at their doors.
The 530- bed fifield hospital in West Allis, she said, is the state’s “ultimate insurance policy.” The hospital was built inside the Exposition Center, a brick building the size of three football fields where the fair, in most years, is a widely attended event.
Inside the hospital, hundreds of white cubicles are lined up one after the next, each with little more than a bed, a waste bin and a curtain for privacy.
In some rural parts of the nation, hospital officials are having to act “almost like air traffiffic control,” moving around patients to open up beds, said Dr. David Basel, a vice president at the Avera Medical Group, based in South Dakota. “Our regional hospitals are all running at or near capacity on a daily basis.”
As the pandemic wears on, hospital offifficials said they were most worried about a shortage in workers. Unlike when the virus was largely concentrated in the Northeast, where medical workers arrived to assist from across the country, the virus is now more widespread, meaning there are few nurses or doctors arriving to help.
“It feels more like a slog that we’re getting through, rather than something we can rally together and defeat rapidly,” said Nancy Foster, a vice president at the American Hospital Association. “There are not asmany folks who can leave their community to help out in another one because they’re struggling to keep up in their own community.”