Hospitals grapple with virus surge
Rising COVID-19 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.
While McLaren Macomb hospital in Mount Clemens is contending with some of the county’s highest patient loads, having days recently where the facility has been at 100% capacity, officials said in a statement Friday that operations are continuing as usual.
“Despite the latest increase in COVID-related hospitalizations, McLaren Macomb hospital has not restricted admissions for either COVID or non-COVID patients due to capacity limitations,” the statement provided by a hospital spokesman and attributed to McLaren Macomb’s executive leadership team stated.
“There are indeed times when, based on daily admissions and discharges, we can approach high capacity percentages. However, we admit and discharge dozens of patients every day and have, over the course of this pandemic, developed effective processes for managing
“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.’’
— Dr. Nick Gilpin, Beaumont’s medical director of Infection Prevention and Epidemiology
those patient loads. Of course, this can change quickly as we have seen significant volume fluctuations throughout this ongoing pandemic. We monitor our patient volumes daily and implement surge plans as necessary to address increased volume demands,” the statement said.
The number of available hospital beds is not the biggest concern, as Gilpin and Riney both emphasized, 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 healthcare 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.
“They’re working different times they don’t normally work - they’re leaving their families at home and doing what they need to do for our patients,’’ Grant said.
She has also reached out to external agencies and looked across the Beaumont system to find individuals who are not typically in the clinical setting and re-deployed them.
“It literally is all hands on deck. People are willing to step up and do what they need to do. We need help, we need to know everybody is doing their part to get us through this,’’ Grant said.
Compared to the first surge in April 2020, the average length of hospital stay has dropped by a few days to an average of 7.7 days across the Henry Ford system. The percentage of patients requiring intensive care has dropped about 10%, according to Riney.
“Part of that is because our population that’s COVID-positive in hospitals today is on an average of 10 years younger than the population in the first surge because the older population has the highest percentage of vaccination rates and therefore have greater protection at this point,’’ Riney said.
Unlike a year ago, hospitals are fully prepared with plenty of PPE and ventilators.
“We’re not strained in that way but we are strained from a staffing perspective. That is by far and away our biggest challenge,’’ Gilpin said.