HOSPITAL STAFFING STARTS TO IMPROVE
Workers isolating because of positive tests now making way back into workplaces
departments across the region continued to struggle with an onslaught of patients Wednesday, but there were some signs that staffing shortages are starting to improve. And, so far, the number of local COVID-19 related hospitalizations at local medical centers has not yet met or exceeded records set last winter.
The latest weekly report from the county health department lists 1,328 COVID-19 patients in hospital beds across San Diego County Tuesday. While that’s 250 percent more than the 379 who were in beds with severe coers ronavirus infections one month ago, it is still less than the 1,804 high watermark set on Jan. 12, 2021. The number of new cases reported daily has recently ranged from the mid-7,000s to the low 10,000s. While those numbers remain high compared to pandemic-long averages, they’re no longer in the five-digit range regularly seen during the second week of January.
Discussing the current COVID-19 situation Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Eric McDonald, the county’s chief medical officer, noted that nobody thinks that local hospitalizations have peaked. But, he said, there is reason to believe that the thousands of workEmergency forced to call in sick after testing positive a week or two ago are finishing their home isolation periods and filtering back into the workforce just when they’re needed most.
“I’m in communication with my counterparts at the hospitals pretty much every day, and my feeling is that the staffing situation seems to be improving slightly; it’s turning the corner just as our number of cases is turning the corner,” McDonald said. “The question is, will it turn the corner fast enough to meet what we know is going to be an increasing surge of COVID patients that come in to hospitals, because we know that’s always a lagging indicator.”
At Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego Wednesday afternoon, every examination room was filled with a few patients already being seen in hallway beds flanked by privacy screens with teal medical drapes hanging from portable metal frames.
Karen Sullivan, Mercy’s emergency department manager, said the situation, while still feeling quite uncertain, felt more
tenable than it did one week ago.
“I would say last week was the most nervous I have ever been,” Sullivan said. “It’s starting to feel throughout the hospital that staffing is improving, whereas last week you’re just wondering, ‘where in the world are we going to put all of these patients?’”
Things were more dire just to the south at Mercy’s sister facility in Chula Vista. An internal disaster declaration Tuesday was later called off as patients were shifted to other facilities, and that was also the case at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center which, officials said, came off its own disaster status Wednesday at 3 a.m. when some patients were transferred to Sharp hospitals in San Diego, La Mesa and Coronado.
Sharp said that while emergency room traffic has been massive, the number of COVID-19 patients getting admitted for treatment has been less vexing than it was last year. Infections caused by the Omicron variant do seem to be less capable of producing the severe levels of respiratory distress that filled intensive care units to overflowing in 2021.
Sharp seems to have recently reached a sort of equilibrium with about 60 COVID-19 hospital admissions per day and roughly the same number of COVID-19 discharges.
More are landing in the “medical and surgical” units that used to be a brief holding ground for patients with severe and progressing lung damage who often ended up on ventilators in 2020 and 2021.
While the symptoms do seem to be less severe, the massively higher number of cases is still generating a significant number of COVID-19 patients who are sick enough to need highflow oxygen treatment and antiviral drugs, which are best delivered intravenously in a hospital bed.
Wendy Baggs, nurse manager of a cardiac care unit at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego, said Tuesday that such patients often still require several days of treatment even if their symptoms are less often severe enough to end up in intensive care.
Those who say that Omicron is no big deal due to its overall-lower rate of death and hospitalization, she said, may not realize that even a moderate case is no picnic. Some simply panic when they find themselves in a room hooked up to an oxygen system.
“One woman, we had to send her to the ICU, because she was so anxious we couldn’t even get her to catch her breath,” Baggs said. “She was young, she didn’t have anything else wrong with her other than COVID and anxiety.”
On Tuesday, about half of the 32 beds in Baggs’ unit, one usually filled entirely with patients recovering from heart procedures, had COVID-19 patients.
That ratio illustrates the current reality for those in the community who need treatment for other reasons not related to coronavirus. Many procedures continue to be canceled because there are often not enough available recovery beds.
It’s a reality that is visibly distressing for Dr. Valerie Norton, chief operations executive at Scripps Mercy San Diego. Though the hospital has tried very hard not to postpone cancer surgeries, she said there have been times when the current crush of patients has made the situation very difficult.
“Sometimes we do three or four cancer patients in the operating room, and then there’s nowhere to put them,” Norton said. “To me, there is another crisis that the public doesn’t always know about, and that’s how much care is being postponed, put off, canceled, delayed because of this inf lux of patients.”