Overwhelmed by COVID-19: A day inside a Louisiana hospital
JEFFERSON, LA. » Before the latest surge of the coronavirus, Louisiana neurologist Robin Davis focused on her specialty: treating patients with epilepsy. These days, as virus patients flood her hospital in record numbers, she has taken on the additional duties of nurse, janitor and orderly.
“I was giving bed baths on Sunday, emptying trash cans, changing sheets, rolling patients to MRI,” said Davis, who has been coming in on her days off to provide some relief to overworked nurses at Ochsner Medical Center in the New Orleans suburb of Jefferson.
The rapidly escalating surge in COVID-19 infections across the U.S. is once again overwhelming hospitals, especially in hot spots such as Louisiana, which hit a record number of coronavirus hospitalizations last week. Nearly 2,900 virus patients are currently hospitalized — and state health officials say the number of cases may not peak for several more weeks. Louisiana has the country’s fourth-lowest vaccination rate, with just a little more than 37% of residents fully inoculated.
On a recent day at Ochsner, health care providers rushed up and down halls, throwing on and taking off protective clothing every time they entered a new area of the building. In dozens of ICU rooms, patients lay pallid and motionless, tubes down their throats, as beeping machines pumped drugs into their system and ventilators forced air into their weakened lungs. Health care contractors brought in from other hospitals quickly familiarized themselves with a new environment as they rushed to ease the load of the overtaxed staff.
“We’re trying to provide the most consistent care we can, but to do that we need more hands,” Davis said. “One of the biggest issues for our nurses is, the volume of patients is such that we’re having to create beds that didn’t previously exist. We’re having to find providers that weren’t previously put in place.”
An overwhelming caseload
Ochsner Health is the largest health care provider in Louisiana, with 40 medical facilities across the state. More than 1,000 people — nearly 40% of the state’s currently hospitalized coronavirus patients — are being treated at Ochsner’s facilities. Roughly 200 of those are at the main campus in Jefferson, where three floors in the hospital’s West Tower have been built out as care units for coronavirus patients.
Resources have been strained to the limit across the state with hospitals starting to turn away people with other life-threatening emergencies such as heart attacks or strokes. Elective surgeries and other nonurgent care have been suspended.
Davis said there’s no greater need for her help than in Ochsner’s thinly stretched nursing department. She noted that her many recent duties have included fetching medication for nurses and pushing patients in wheelchairs.
“If it took pressure off a nurse, if it gave her time to do what she needed to do, that’s what we did,” she said. “Sunday was supposed to be my day off with my kids, but we need help here, and one day I want to be able to tell those two little boys I did the thing that was needed at the time it was needed.”