Hospitals across the U.S. are feeling the wrath of the omicron variant and getting thrown into disarray that is different from earlier COVID-19 surges.
This time, they face severe shortages, as many health care staff are in poor condition with the fast-spreading variant. People are showing up in large numbers in emergency rooms in hopes of being screened for COVID-19, putting more pressure on the system. And an unexpected percentage of patients (two-thirds in some cases) test positive in the hospital for other reasons.
At the same time, hospitals say patients aren’t as bad in health as those who came in the last wave, intensive care teams aren’t as comprehensive, and ventilators aren’t as necessary as they used to be.
However, pressures are prompting hospitals to reduce elective surgeries and shut down services, while National Guard troops have been sent to several states to medical centers and control sites.
Nearly two years after the pandemic, frustration and tiredness are at an all-time high among fitness care workers.
“It gets very exhausting, and I’m very polite in saying this,” said Dr. Robert Glasgow of Utah Health University, which has many remote or unhealthy workers.
About 85,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19, just short of the delta-surge peak of about 94,000 in early September, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The all-time high during the pandemic was about 125,000 in January of last year.
But the hospitalization figures don’t tell the full story. Some cases in the official count involve COVID-19 infections that were not what brought patients to the hospital in the first place.
Dr. Fritz François, hospital operations leader at NYU Langone Health in New York City, said that approximately 65% of patients admitted to this formula with COVID-19 have recently been hospitalized more frequently for anything else and it has been discovered through the possibility as carriers of the virus.
At two Seattle primary hospitals in the past two weeks, three-quarters of the 64 patients who tested positive for the coronavirus have been admitted with a number one diagnosis other than COVID-19.
Joanne Spetz, associate director of research at the Healthforce Center at the University of California, San Francisco, said the rising number of cases like that is both good and bad.
The lack of symptoms shows vaccines, boosters and natural immunity from prior infections are working, she said. The bad news is that the numbers mean the coronavirus is spreading rapidly, and some percentage of those people will wind up needing hospitalization.
This week, 36% of California hospitals reported critical staffing shortages. And 40% are expecting such shortages.
Some hospitals are reporting as much as one quarter of their staff out for virus-related reasons, said Kiyomi Burchill, the California Hospital Association’s vice president for policy and leader on pandemic matters.
In response, hospitals are turning to temporary staffing agencies or transferring patients out.
University of Utah Health plans to keep more than 50 beds open because it doesn’t have enough nurses. It is also rescheduling surgeries that aren’t urgent. In Florida, a hospital temporarily closed its maternity ward because of staff shortages.
In Alabama, where most of the population is unvaccinated, UAB Health in Birmingham put out an urgent request for people to go elsewhere for COVID-19 tests or minor symptoms and stay home for all but true emergencies. Treatment rooms were so crowded that some patients had to be evaluated in hallways and closets.
As of Monday, New York state had just over 10,000 people in the hospital with COVID-19, including 5,500 in New York City. That’s the most in either the city or state since the disastrous spring of 2020.
Officials at New York City Hospital, however, have reported that things have not been disastrous. In general, patients are not as in poor health as they were back then. Of the patients hospitalized in New York, about 600 were in intensive care beds. .
“We’re not even halfway to what we were in April 2020,” said Dr. David Battinelli, the physician-in-chief for Northwell Health, New York state’s largest hospital system.
Similarly, in Washington state, the number of other people inflamed with COVID-19 on ventilators has increased for more than two weeks, yet the percentage of patients requiring such a device has decreased.
In South Carolina, which is experiencing an unprecedented number of new cases and a strong backlog of hospitalizations, Gov. Henry McMaster took note of the probably less severe variant, saying, “There’s no appetite to panic. Calm. Be happy. “
Amid the increased demand for COVID-19 testing brought on through omicron in the United States, New York City firefighters are asking others not to call an ambulance just because they are suffering to locate a test.
In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine announced new or expanded checkpoints in nine cities to keep check applicants away from emergencies. Approximately three hundred members of the National Guard are sent to these centers.
In Connecticut, many emergency room patients are bedridden in hallways and nurses paint duplicate because of a lack of staff, said Sherri Dayton, a nurse at the Backus Plainfield Emergency Care Center. Many emergency rooms have hours of waiting, he said.
“We are drowning. We’re exhausted,” Dayton said.
Doctors and nurses complain of burnout and feel that their neighbors are no longer treating the pandemic as a crisis, despite record cases of COVID-19 every day.
“In the past, we didn’t have the vaccine, so we had all our hands together, the whole Array, but that’s been reduced in the network and other people seem to be moving forward without us,” said Rachel Chamberlin, a Dartmouth nurse. -Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire.
Edward Merrens, clinical director of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, said more than 85 of the hospitalized COVID-19 patients were not vaccinated.
Several patients in the hospital’s COVID-19 intensive care unit were on ventilators, with a breathing tube in their throats. In one room, staff members were preparing for what they feared would be the last circle of relatives in which a dying patient would be detained.
One of the unvaccinated Fred Rutherford, a 55-year-old boy from Claremont, New Hampshire, his son pulled him out of space when he became ill and took him to the hospital, where he needed a breathing tube for a while and feared he would die.
If he goes home, he said, he promises to get vaccinated and tell others to do it too.
“I probably thought I was immortal, that I was tough,” Rutherford said, speaking from his hospital bed behind a window, his voice weak and shaky.
But he added: “I will do anything I can to be the voice of people that don’t understand you’ve got to get vaccinated. You’ve got to get it done to protect each other.”
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Casey reported from Boston and Thompson from Sacramento. Associated Press writers Terry Tang and Bobby Calvan in New York City contributed to this report.