Hospitals grappling with surge in COVID-19

Rising case numbers putting strain on facilities

Beaumont’s Dr. Nick Gilpin said the current COVID surge in Michigan is like a runaway train.

The case numbers keep climbing and hospitals are nearing capacity.

The eight hospitals in the Beaumont health system went from 128 COVID patients on Feb. 28 to more than 800 on Thursday.

It’s the same at other health systems too.

“Our occupancy the last few days has varied between 90-95% which in essence is a full house

at all sites. It is something that concerns us significantly, said Bob Riney, president of health care operations for the Henry Ford Health System.

He said Henry Ford has about 550 patients (it changes hourly) across the system which includes six hospitals. At one point in the past year they were down to 50 COVID patients. At the peak last April they had more than 900, but they had very few patients who were not admitted for COVID.

“We are seeing a younger patient population and along with that we’re not seeing necessarily as severe of disease overall but don’t mistake that for the fact that we’re seeing less severe disease we’re still absolutely seeing incredibly sick patients,’’ said Gilpin, Beaumont’s medical director of Infection Prevention and Epidemiology.

“Our emergency centers and COVID units are filling up once again. This is putting a lot of strain on our staff which is our most precious resource,’’ Gilpin added.

The number of available hospital beds is not the biggest concern, as Gilpin and Riney both emphasized, the staffing is the big issue.

This newest surge —

Michigan’s third — has a few new twists, but at most hospitals it’s the same doctors, nurses and health care staff that are continuing the fight against a pandemic that is in its 14th month.

“After having done this for over a year now our nurses, our doctors, respiratory therapists, our teams, they’re tired and they’re worn,’’ said Susan Grant, Beaumont’s chief nursing officer.

“They’re not only physically tired and worn, they’re emotionally tired and worn and they want this to go away. That emotional exhaustion has come from experiencing and being present for observing the enormous toll that this virus has taken on patients, on families, on their own personal lives. They’ve seen a lot of death over the last year and now they are experiencing and seeing younger people who are in our ICU beds who are very, very sick, who are in the emergency rooms and hospital beds who are very sick and some who are dying,’’ Grant added.

She said they’ve done a number of things to create staffing options for both the hospitals and the Beaumont vaccine clinics. Some staff are picking up extra shifts.