2 in 5 Americans live where ICUs are strained
Straining to handle record numbers of C OVID -19 patients, hundreds of t he nation's intensive care units are running out of space and supplies and competing to hire temporary traveling nurses at soaring rates. Many of the facilities are clustered in the South and West.
An Associated Press analysis of federal hospital data shows that since November, the share of U.S. hospitals nearing the breaking point has doubled. More than 40% of Americans now live in areas running out of ICU space, with only 15% of beds still available.
Intensive care units are the final defense for the
sickest of the sick, patients who are nearly suffocating or facing organ failure. Nurses who work in the most stressed ICUs, changing IV bags and monitoring patients on breathing machines, are exhausted.
“You can' t push great people forever. Right? I mean, it just isn' t possible ,” said Houston Methodist CEO Dr. Marc Boom, who is among many hospital leaders hoping that the numbers of critically ill COVID- 19 patients have begun to plateau. Worryingly, there's an average of 20,000 new cases ada yin Texas, which has the third-highest death count in the country and more than 13,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19related symptoms.
In Oklahoma City, OU Medicine Chief Medical Officer Dr. Cameron Mantor said while the vaccines hold promise, hope still seems dim as ICU cases keep mounting. The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations at OU Medicine has declined from more than 100 daily in recent weeks to 98 on Wednesday, Mantor said.
“What is stressing everybody out," Mantor said, “is looking at week after week after week, the spigot is not being turned off, not knowing there is a break, not seeing the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel."
According to data through Thursday f rom the COVID Tracking Project, hospitalizations are still high in the West and t he South, with over 80,000 current COVID19 hospital patients in those regions. The number of cases reported in the U.S. since the pandemic's start surpassed 25 million on Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Encouragingly, hospitalizations appear to have either plateaued or are tr ending downward across all regions. It's unclear whether the easing will continue with more contagious versions of the virus arising and snags in the rollout of vaccines.
In New Mexico, one surging hospital system brought in 300 temporary nurses from outside the state, at a cost of millions of dollars, to deal with overflowing ICU patients, who were treated in converted procedure rooms and surgery suites.
“It's been horrid,” said Dr. Jason Mitchell, chief medical officer for Presbyterian Healthcare Services in Albuquerque. He's comforted that the hospital never activated its plan for rationing lifesaving care, which would have required a triage team to rank patients with numerical scores based on who was least likely to survive.
“It's a relief that we never had to actually do it,” Mitchell said. “It sounds scary because it is scary.”
In Los Angeles, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center ran into shortages of take-home oxygen tanks, which meant some patients who could otherwise go home were kept longer, taking up needed beds. But the biggest problem is competing with other hospitals for traveling nurses.
“Initially, when the COVID surges were hitting one part of the country at a time, traveling nurses were able to go to areas more severely affected. Now with almost the entire country surging at the same time,” hospitals are paying twice and three times what they would normally pay for temporary, traveling nurses, said Dr. Jeff Smith, the hospital's chief operating officer.
Houston Methodist Hospital recently paid $8,000 retention bonuses to keep staff nurses from signing up with agencies that would send them to other hot spots. Pay for traveling nurses can reach $6,000 per week, an enticement that can benefit a nurse but can seem like poaching to the hospital executives who watch nurses leave.
“There's a lot of these agencies that are out there charging absolutely ridiculous sums of money to get ICU nurses in,” Boom said. “They go to California, which is in the midst of a surge, but they poach some ICU nurses there, send them to Texas, where they charge inordinate amounts to fill in gaps in Texas, many of which are created because nurses in Texas went to Florida or back to California.”
Space is another problem. Augusta University Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia, is treating adult ICU patients, under age 30, in the children's hospital. Recovery rooms now have I CU patients, and, if things get worse, other areas — operating rooms and endoscopy centers — will be the next areas converted for critical care.
To prevent rural hospitals from sending more patients to Augusta, the hospital is using telemedicine to help manage those patients for as long as possible in their local hospitals.