Hospitals are running out of staff, supplies, and beds for Covid-19 patients — and this time could be worse

https://www.vox.com/2020/7/15/21317776/covid-19-coronavirus-florida-arizona-texas-california-hospitals

If hospitalizations continue to rise, health care workers in Arizona, Texas, and California fear they’ll be completely overwhelmed.

By Eliza Barclay and Dylan Scott Jul 15, 2020, 4:30pm EDT


With Covid-19 hospitalizations steadily approaching a record high in the US, states like Arizona have activated emergency plans and requested refrigerated trucks to prepare for overflow at morgues. Doctors there say packed emergency rooms and ICUs are forcing them to prioritize the sickest patients, leaving other ill patients to deteriorate while waiting for care they’d ordinarily receive right away.

Hospitals in hot spots across the country are expanding and even maxing out their staff, equipment, and beds, with doctors warning that the worst-case scenario of hospital resources being overwhelmed is on the horizon if their states don’t get better control of the coronavirus.

“With Covid, a lot of times people who aren’t sick enough yet get pushed to the back, and then they can become really, really sick unfortunately because we were focusing our efforts on the people who are on the brink of death,” an emergency room doctor at the Banner Health system in the Phoenix metro area, who asked to go unnamed fearing retaliation from his employer, told Vox.

Other doctors in Arizona, where 88 percent of hospital beds statewide were in use Tuesday, say the scarcity of resources means they’ll soon be rationing medical care, as doctors in Italy were forced to do.

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It’s not just Arizona. Doctors and hospital experts in Texas and Southern California say capacity is a major concern for them as well, particularly if new daily cases keep rising. Several counties in California are facing major outbreaks of the virus, with hospital resources stretched thin to care for the sickest patients.

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Hospital organizations in Florida say facilities there can still expand capacity if needed. But they, like other hot spot hospitals, are starting to cut back on elective surgeries and procedures — leading them to furlough staff in some cases to compensate for massive losses in revenue — to accommodate the rising tide of Covid-19 patients.

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Another ICU doctor in Phoenix, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his employer has forbidden staff to speak to the media, described increasingly low morale among health care workers in the state.

“I think a lot of us feel as if our community has abandoned us almost, because there’s a lot of fake news about how masks are not helping the spread,” he says. “I think there’s just a sense of abandonment almost where we feel like we don’t have the support of our community; this individual selfishness that we’re seeing in society is really upsetting. And I think psychologically it’s really affecting a lot of my nurses and staff.” Some of them, he says, are so frustrated and worried about getting sick themselves that they’re not coming to work as much, calling in sick, or just cutting their hours.

Akhter thinks there are a lot of people in Arizona who still don’t believe Covid-19 is bad. “If their mother gets sick, even with non-Covid, with appendicitis, for example, what do they think is going to happen if there are no hospital beds? I don’t know what else to say other than, like, ‘What if your loved one gets sick, where do you think she’s gonna go?’”

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[Read the whole article at the link above for more details on Texas and California.]