Overtaxed health facilities on brink of rationing care

BOISE, IDAHO >> Soldiers triaging patients in parking lots in a capital city is normally the stuff of science fiction.

Yet that’s the reality in Boise, where troops direct people outside an urgentcare clinic revamped into a facility for coronavirus patients as infections and deaths surge in Idaho and nationwide.

Inside Primary Health Medical Group’s clinic, physician assistant Nicole Thomas works extra 12hour shifts to help out. She dons goggles, an N95 mask, a surgical mask over that, gloves and a body covering to examine 36 patients a day with symptoms. Some days, she says, half of them test positive for COVID-19.

“I’ve had patients crying in the car because they think they’re going to die,” Thomas said recently, resting against a desk between patients. “There are some people that it’s just a mild cold, and there are some people in the ICU on life support. We don’t know, medicinewise, how it’s going to affect them.”

What was once a facility with family practice doctors and an urgent care that treated things like cuts and colds has become a COVID-19 clinic, showing how a crush of virus patients is straining intertwined health care systems. In a conservative state where many are resisting pandemic restrictions, overworked staff are getting sick themselves or quitting to avoid the stress.

Idaho’s attempt to hold the coronavirus in check is failing, health officials say. Just over 1,000 people have died from COVID-19 so far, about four to five times the number of annual deaths from flu and pneumonia. Confirmed infections have surpassed 100,000.

Elective surgeries mostly have been halted to conserve bed space and staff. COVID-19 patients have been sent home with monitoring devices to care for themselves. After Thanksgiving gatherings, officials fear a surge of infections that could force difficult choices about what to do with patients when there’s no more room or anyone available to treat them.

“When would we reach absolute capacity? I just don’t know. But we’re nervous,” said Barton Hill, vice president of St. Luke’s Health System, which has hospitals in southwestern and central Idaho.

“I never dreamed that we would be challenged like this,” Steve Judy, chief operating officer of Primary Health Medical Group, said as he visited the clinic where Thomas works.

Primary Health’s 20 clinics in southwestern Idaho normally have an urgent care on one side and family practice doctors on the other. Eight have been transformed into facilities that see only COVID-19 patients.