2 in 5 Americans live in areas running out of ICU space amid COVID-19
About two in five Americans live in areas that are running out of ICU space amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new analysis.
The number of US hospitals nearing the breaking point has doubled since November, according to an Associated Press examination of federal hospital data.
More than 40 percent of Americans now live in areas with only 15 percent of ICU beds — reserved for the most severely ill — still available.
Nurses who work in the most affected ICUs are struggling to keep up, Houston Methodist CEO Dr. Marc Boom told the AP.
“You can’t push great people forever,” Boom said. “Right? I mean, it just isn’t possible.”
Meanwhile, Texas is grappling with an average of nearly 19,000 cases reported each day, more than 13,000 people hospitalized and the third-highest death count nationwide.
One surging hospital system in New Mexico brought in 300 temporary nurses from out-of-state — costing millions of dollars — to treat overflowing ICU patients, who were moved to converted procedure rooms and surgery suites.
“It’s been horrid,” said Dr. Jason Mitchell, chief medical officer for Presbyterian Healthcare Services in Albuquerque.
He is relieved, however, that the hospital never needed to activate its plan for rationing lifesaving care, which would have required a triage team to rank patients based on who was least likely to survive.
“It’s a relief that we never had to actually do it,” the doctor said. “It sounds scary because it is scary.”
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles dealt with shortages of take-home oxygen tanks, which kept some patients hospitalized when they could have otherwise gone home.
But the biggest struggle, he said, is competing for traveling nurses with other hospitals who are in need.
“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,” said Dr. Jeff Smith, the hospital’s chief operating officer.
But now, with simultaneous surges across most of the country, hospitals are paying twice and three times the normal rate for temporary, traveling nurses, Smith said.
More than 25 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in the US as of Monday afternoon, Johns Hopkins University data shows.
As of Sunday, the most recent data available on the COVID Tracking Project website, a seven-day average of 47,659 people are hospitalized due to the virus in the south, 28,003 in the west, 19,544 in the northeast and 15,101 in the Midwest.
But encouragingly, hospitalizations appear to have either plateaued or are trending downward across all regions. It’s to be determined whether that trend will continue with the spread of contagious variants of the virus and hitches in vaccine rollouts.
With Post wires
