Cleveland Clinic has about 1,000 employees away from work due to COVID-19, the health system told Becker’s Nov. 23.
The count includes 925 workers in Ohio and other workers across the health system, which also has locations in Florida and Las Vegas. It is an increase from about 800 Cleveland Clinic employees in Ohio reported sidelined as of Nov. 16.
Cleveland Clinic spokesperson Andrea Pacetti said the increase in the number of employees affected by COVID-19 reflects more spreading of the virus in the community and in Ohio, and most affected employees are contracting the virus in the community.
Due to a surge in cases, Cleveland Clinic has taken steps to ensure enough staffing to meet patients’ needs, said Ms. Pacetti. This includes shifting some employees to different areas of the health system to enable Cleveland Clinic to expand bed capacity for COVID-19 patients.
“We are also evaluating our surgical schedule weekly based on hospital occupancy and admissions of patients with COVID-19,” Ms. Pacetti said. “Our leadership meets every day and reviews our staffing to ensure we can provide the highest quality care to all our patients.”
Cleveland Clinic also urges the public to help reduce the spread of the virus so the health system can continue to care for COVID-19 patients and patients who need care but who don’t have the coronavirus.
“This isn’t just a Cleveland Clinic issue, but true for the whole state. We are asking the community to follow guidelines — wear masks, social distance and wash your hands — so we can keep our medical teams healthy,” Ms. Pacetti said.
Cleveland Clinic has about 50,000 employees in Ohio.
As record numbers of coronavirus cases overwhelm hospitals across the United States, there is something strikingly different from the surge that inundated cities in the spring: No one is clamoring for ventilators.
The sophisticated breathing machines, used to sustain the most critically ill patients, are far more plentiful than they were eight months ago, when New York, New Jersey and other hard-hit states were desperate to obtain more of the devices, and hospitals were reviewing triage protocols for rationing care. Now, many hot spots face a different problem: They have enough ventilators, but not nearly enough respiratory therapists, pulmonologists and critical care doctors who have the training to operate the machines and provide round-the-clock care for patients who cannot breathe on their own.
Since the spring, American medical device makers have radically ramped up the country’s ventilator capacity by producing more than 200,000 critical care ventilators, with 155,000 of them going to the Strategic National Stockpile. At the same time, doctors have figured out other ways to deliver oxygen to some patients struggling to breathe — including using inexpensive sleep apnea machines or simple nasal cannulas that force air into the lungs through plastic tubes.
But with new cases approaching 200,000 per day and a flood of patients straining hospitals across the country, public health experts warn that the ample supply of available ventilators may not be enough to save many critically ill patients.
“We’re now at a dangerous precipice,” said Dr. Lewis Kaplan, president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. Ventilators, he said, are exceptionally complex machines that require expertise and constant monitoring for the weeks or even months that patients are tethered to them. The explosion of cases in rural parts of Idaho, Ohio, South Dakota and other states has prompted local hospitals that lack such experts on staff to send patients to cities and regional medical centers, but those intensive care beds are quickly filling up.
Public health experts have long warned about a shortage of critical care doctors, known as intensivists, a specialty that generally requires an additional two years of medical training. There are 37,400 intensivists in the United States, according to the American Hospital Association, but nearly half of the country’s acute care hospitals do not have any on staff, and many of those hospitals are in rural areas increasingly overwhelmed by the coronavirus.
“We can’t manufacture doctors and nurses in the same way we can manufacture ventilators,” said Dr. Eric Toner, an emergency room doctor and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “And you can’t teach someone overnight the right settings and buttons to push on a ventilator for patients who have a disease they’ve never seen before. The most realistic thing we can do in the short run is to reduce the impact on hospitals, and that means wearing masks and avoiding crowded spaces so we can flatten the curve of new infections.”
Medical association message boards in states like Iowa, Oklahoma and North Dakota are awash in desperate calls for intensivists and respiratory therapists willing to temporarily relocate and help out. When New York City and hospitals in the Northeast issued a similar call for help this past spring, specialists from the South and the Midwest rushed there. But because cases are now surging nationwide, hospital officials say that most of their pleas for help are going unanswered.
Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs, the top health official in Mississippi, said that more than half the state’s 1,048 ventilators were still available, but that he was more concerned with having enough staff members to take care of the sickest patients.
“If we want to make sure that someone who’s hospitalized in the I.C.U. with the coronavirus has the best chance to get well, they need to have highly trained personnel, and that cannot be flexed up rapidly,” he said in a news briefing on Tuesday.
Dr. Matthew Trump, a critical care specialist at UnityPoint Health in Des Moines, said that the health chain’s 21 hospitals had an adequate supply of ventilators for now, but that out-of-state staff reinforcements might be unlikely to materialize as colleagues fall ill and the hospital’s I.C.U. beds reach capacity.
“People here are exhausted and burned out from the past few months,” he said. “I’m really concerned.”
The domestic boom in ventilator production has been a rare bright spot in the country’s pandemic response, which has been marred by shortages of personal protective equipment, haphazard testing efforts and President Trump’s mixed messaging on the importance of masks, social distancing and other measures that can dent the spread of new infections.
Although the White House has sought to take credit for the increase in new ventilators, medical device executives say the accelerated production was largely a market-driven response turbocharged by the national sense of crisis. Mr. Trump invoked the wartime Defense Production Act in late March, but federal health officials have relied on government contracts rather than their authority under the act to compel companies to increase the production of ventilators.
Scott Whitaker, president of AdvaMed, a trade association that represents many of the country’s ventilator manufacturers, said the grave situation had prompted a “historic mobilization” by the industry. “We’re confident that our companies are well positioned to mobilize as needed to meet demand,” he said in an email.
Public health officials in Minnesota, Mississippi, Utah and other states with some of the highest per capita rates of infection and hospitalization have said they are comfortable with the number of ventilators currently in their hospitals and their stockpiles.
Mr. Whitaker said AdvaMed’s member companies were making roughly 700 ventilators a week before the pandemic; by the summer, weekly output had reached 10,000. The juggernaut was in part fueled by unconventional partnerships between ventilator companies and auto giants like Ford and General Motors.
Chris Brooks, chief strategy officer at Ventec Life Systems, which collaborated with G.M. to fill a $490 million contract for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the shared sense of urgency enabled both companies to overcome a thicket of supply-chain and logistical challenges to produce 30,000 ventilators over four months at an idled car parts plant in Indiana. Before the pandemic, Ventec’s average monthly output was 100 to 200 machines.
“When you’re focused with one team and one mission, you get things done in hours that would otherwise take months,” he said. “You just find a way to push through any and all obstacles.”
Despite an overall increase in the number of ventilators, some researchers say many of the new machines may be inadequate for the current crisis. Dr. Richard Branson, an expert on mechanical ventilation at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and an author of a recent study in the journal Chest, said that half of the new devices acquired by the Strategic National Stockpile were not sophisticated enough for Covid-19 patients in severe respiratory distress. He also expressed concern about the long-term viability of machines that require frequent maintenance.
“These devices were not built to be stockpiled,” he said.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which has acknowledged the limitations of its newly acquired ventilators, said the stockpile — nine times as large as it was in March — was well suited for most respiratory pandemics. “These stockpiled devices can be used as a short-term, stopgap buffer when the immediate commercial supply is not sufficient or available,” the agency said in a statement.
Projecting how many people will end up requiring mechanical breathing assistance is an inexact science, and many early assumptions about how the coronavirus affects respiratory function have evolved.
During the chaotic days of March and April, emergency room doctors were quick to intubate patients with dangerously low oxygen levels. They subsequently discovered other ways to improve outcomes, including placing patients on their stomachs, a protocol known as proning that helps improve lung function. The doctors also learned to embrace the use of pressurized oxygen delivered through the nose, or via BiPAP and CPAP machines, portable devices that force oxygen into a patient’s airways.
Many health care providers initially hesitated to use such interventions for fear the pressurized air would aerosolize the virus and endanger health care workers. The risks, it turned out, could be mitigated through the use of respirator masks and other personal protective gear, said Dr. Greg Martin, the chief of pulmonary and critical care at Grady Health Systems in Atlanta.
“The familiarity of taking care of so many Covid patients, combined with good data, has just made everything we do 100 times easier,” he said.
Some of the earliest data about the perils of intubating coronavirus patients turned out to be incomplete and misleading. Dr. Susan Wilcox, a critical care specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said many providers were spooked by data that suggested an 80 percent mortality rate among ventilated coronavirus patients, but the actual death rate turned out to be much lower. The mortality rate at her hospital, she said, was about 25 to 30 percent.
“Some people were saying that we should intubate almost immediately because we were worried patients would crash and have untoward consequences if we waited,” she said. “But we’ve learned to just go back to the principles of good critical care.”
Survival rates have increased significantly at many hospitals, a shift brought about by the introduction of therapeutics like dexamethasone, a powerful steroid that Mr. Trump took when he was hospitalized with the coronavirus. The changing demographics of the pandemic — a growing proportion of younger patients with fewer health risks — have also played a role in the improving survival rates.
Dr. Nikhil Jagan, a critical care pulmonologist at CHI Health, a hospital chain that serves Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, said many of the coronavirus patients who were arriving at his emergency room now were less sick than the patients he treated in the spring.
“There’s a lot more awareness about the symptoms of Covid-19,” he said. “The first go-around, when people came in, they were very sick right off the bat and in respiratory distress or at the point of respiratory failure and had to be intubated.”
But the promising new treatments and enhanced knowledge can go only so far should the current surge in cases continue unabated. The country passed 250,000 deaths from the coronavirus last week, a reminder that many critically ill patients do not survive. The daily death toll has been rising steadily and is approaching 2,000.
“Ventilators are important in critical care but they don’t save people’s lives,” said Dr. Branson of the University of Cincinnati. “They just keep people alive while the people caring for them can figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem. And at the moment, we just don’t have enough of those people.”
For now, he said there was only one way out the crisis: “It’s not that hard,” he said. “Wear a mask.”
In talking to our health system members from across the country in the past few weeks, we’ve heard that the COVID surge is happening everywhere. Nearly everyone we’ve talked to has told us that their inpatient census of COVID patients is as high or higher now than during the initial wave of the pandemic in March and April. And nearly everyone is expecting it to get much worse over the next few weeks, as hospitalizations increase in the wake of the explosion of cases we’re seeing now.
But there is something striking in our conversations in comparison to eight months ago: no one seems to be panicking. Crisis management processes that were developed and honed early in the pandemic are proving very helpful now. Normal patient care services are continuing despite the uptick in COVID volume, and protections are in place to keep the care environment segregated and COVID-free as possible.
While dozens of health systems, many in the hardest hit states in the Midwest and Great Plains, have announced plans to curtail elective care during this third wave, the decisions are based on individual hospital capacity and staffing, instead of being mandated by states. Having largely worked through the “COVID backlog” across the summer and early fall, system leaders want to avoid canceling surgeries again, and few are expecting state governments to force them to.
Many of our members have drawn up plans for selective cancellations depending on capacity, but we’re not likely to see sweeping shutdowns again—unless the workforce becomes so overstretched that it impacts operations.
That’s good news, and will likely lead to less interrupted patient care. And it’s good news for hospitals’ and doctors’ economic survival, as many would not be able to absorb the body blow of another widespread shutdown. Fingers crossed.
A group of health system leaders in Missouri challenged state-reported hospital bed data, saying it could lead to a misunderstanding about hospital capacity, according to a Nov. 19 report in the St. Louis Business Journal.
A consortium of health systems, including St. Louis-based BJC HealthCare, Mercy, SSM Health and St. Luke’s Hospital, released urgent reports warning that hospital and ICU beds are nearing capacity while state data reports show a much different story.
The state reports, based on data from TeleTracking and the CDC-managed National Healthcare Safety Network, show inpatient hospital bed capacity at 35 percent and remaining ICU bed capacity at 29 percent on Nov. 19. However, the consortium reported hospitals are fuller, at 84 percent capacity as of Nov. 18, and ICUs at 90 percent capacity based on staffed bed availability. The consortium says it is using staffed bed data while the state’s numbers are based on licensed bed counts; the state contends it does take staffing into account, according to the report.
Stephanie Zoller Mueller, a spokesperson for the consortium, said the discrepancy between the state’s data and consortium’s data could create a “gross misunderstanding on the part of some and can be a dangerous message to the community.”
A collection of provider and payer groups are imploring Congress to continue a moratorium on Medicare payment cuts instituted under the sequester.
The letter (PDF), sent Friday by more than 20 groups to congressional leaders, is concerned that the moratorium installed under the CARES Act expires on Jan. 1. The groups want the moratorium to extend through the COVID-19 public health emergency, which has been renewed by the federal government several times.
The groups said that the moratorium needs to be extended as healthcare facilities are under massive financial stress with new surges of COVID-19.
The surge has impacted the “financial health of medical professionals and facilities, including increased cost of labor to ensure adequate staffing, procurement of personal protective equipment, significant reductions in patient volume resulting from orders to cancel non-emergent procedures and the high cost of caring for COVID patients,” the letter said.
Some of the groups signing on to the letter include the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, Federation of American Hospitals and American College of Physicians.
The groups said that the moratorium on the sequester cuts installed as part of the CARES Act was an acknowledgment from Congress over the important role that Medicare reimbursement plays in “the financial well being of our healthcare system.”
The sequestration cut Medicare payments by 2% across the board to all Medicare providers back in 2013.
The letter comes as Congress is pondering another relief package for COVID-19 during the lame-duck period. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the presidential election that he was open to restarting talks on a new relief package and added that hospitals will need some additional relief.
But McConnell said earlier this week that the same issues that have held up a deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are still there.
“I don’t think the current situation demands a multi-trillion dollar package,” McConnell told reporters. “I think it should be highly targeted.”
But Pelosi has endorsed a larger package. The House passed the HEROES Act, a $3 trillion relief bill, several months ago.
A federal appeals court upheld a ruling that would allow hospitals to calculate their disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments using Medicaid patients as well as patients eligible for treatment under experimental Medicaid “demonstration projects” approved by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The opinion, issued Friday, upheld the decision of a lower court that sided with 10 Florida hospitals seeking to include days of care funded by Florida’s Low Income Pool, an approved Medicaid demonstration project. Through the pool, the state and federal governments jointly reimbursed hospitals for care provided to uninsured and underinsured patients.
HHS argued against allowing the hospitals to include those patients in their Medicaid fraction on the ground that the patients were treated out of charity rather than as designated beneficiaries of a demonstration project.
“The district court found the Secretary’s arguments to the contrary unpersuasive. The Secretary argued the text of the regulation allows hospitals to include days of care provided under a demonstration project only if the project entitles specific patients to specific benefit packages,” the judges said (PDF). “As the court noted, however, this is not what the regulation says. Rather, a patient must have been ‘eligible for inpatient services,’ meaning the demonstration project enabled the patient to receive inpatient services, regardless whether the project gave the patient a right to these services or allowed the patient to enroll in an insurance plan that provided the services.”
DSH payments have traditionally been calculated using the costs incurred to treat Medicaid and uninsured patients. However, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid’s 2017 rule says costs incurred treating other patients are applicable. For example, a dually eligible patient who’s admitted to the hospital will likely have their stay paid for by Medicare, the agency said, as Medicaid is treated as the “payer of last resort.” As such, those costs would be eligible to be subtracted from DSH payouts.
In backing the hospitals on the DSH dispute, the judges pointed to a similar case considered by the Fifth Circuit last year in which the agency sought to exclude from the Medicaid fraction days of care funded through an “uncompensated care pool” created by a demonstration project. That pool reimbursed hospitals in Mississippi for services provided to uninsured patients affected by Hurricane Katrina but did not entitle specific patients to specific services.
In that case, the Fifth Circuit held “plain regulatory text demands that such days be included—period.”
“We see no flaw in Judge Collyer’s analysis and therefore embrace the district court’s opinion as the law of this circuit,” the judges said.
Providence health system reported a $214 loss for the first nine months of the year, as the system continues to recover patient volume that declined during the pandemic.
The 51-hospital not-for-profit system also gave an update on its patient volumes during a recent earnings release.
Providence posted operating revenues of $18.9 billion during the first nine months of 2020, but its operating expenses ballooned to $19.1 billion.
That was an increase of 4% compared to the same period in 2019.
“The increased expenses were largely driven by the higher cost of labor, supplies and pharmaceuticals needed to safely and effectively respond to COVID-19,” Providence said in a release.
But the system is also fighting a major decline in patient volumes.
Hospital systems across the country faced plummeting patient volumes in March and April as COVID-19 spread across the country and facilities were forced to cancel or postpone elective procedures.
But even as patients started to return to the hospital in the spring and summer, volumes continue to be below pre-pandemic levels.
“Year-to-date volumes as measured by case mix adjusted admissions were 10% lower than the same period last year,” Providence said.
But a bright spot for the system has been its pivot to virtual care.
“We’ve dramatically ramped up virtual care and are on track to log 1.4 million video visits by the end of the year,” said Providence President and CEO Rod Hochman, M.D.
The income loss also comes as Providence recognized $682 million in relief funding as part of a $175 billion fund passed by Congress as part of the CARES Act.
Providence also got help from a recovering stock market.
The system posted year-to-date, non-operating income of $263 million during the first nine months of the year, compared with $772 million during the same period in 2019.
“Non-operating income helps to recoup reimbursement shortfalls from Medicaid and Medicare coverage, allowing us to serve vulnerable populations while balancing our financial standing,” Providence said.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit to stop Memphis, Tennessee-based Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare’s $250 million acquisition of two hospitals in the area owned by Tenet Healthcare.
The agency said in the federal lawsuit filed Friday that the acquisition of two Memphis-based hospitals known as Saint Francis would imperil competition in the area.
Competition would dampen for a “broad range of inpatient medical and surgical diagnostic and treatment services that require an overnight hospital stay,” the FTC said in a release Friday. “If the proposed acquisition is consummated, healthcare costs will rise.”
FTC said only four hospital systems provide general services to the area. If the deal goes through, the new health system would control approximately 60% of the Memphis market.
“It’s clear that patients in the Memphis area have benefited from the competitive pressure that Saint Francis brings to bear on Methodist, through lower rates, more options for insurers and patients, and quality improvements,” said Daniel Francis, deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, in a statement.
FTC is seeking a preliminary injunction to halt the deal until completion of a trial next year.
This is the latest move by the FTC to combat hospital mergers. Last year, the FTC launched a probe into the effects of health system mergers on prices and healthcare quality.
Methodist and Tenet said in a joint statement they are reviewing the lawsuit and were bewildered by the move.
“We are surprised by the FTC action given the strong support for the transaction by local stakeholders, including leading local health plans, physicians, employers and community leaders,” the statement said.
The U.S. recorded 184,514 new COVID-19 infections Nov. 13, a 20 percent increase from the new case count one day prior, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The country also hit a 10-day high in daily deaths, with 1,431 reported Nov. 13.
The COVID Tracking Project reported more 68,516 hospitalizations for Nov. 13, with 19 percent of those patients in intensive care units and 6 percent on ventilators.
Here are several other noteworthy developments related to COVID-19 in the U.S. over the past 24 hours:
1. Several governors rolled out measures Nov. 13 to mitigate the virus’s spread, according to the Wall Street Journal.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a two-week shutdown of all nonessential activities effective Nov. 16. COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state tripled in the past four weeks.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown tightened capacity restrictions for restaurants, gyms, retail stores and places of worship, effective Nov. 18.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam expanded a mask mandate and restricted public and private gatherings in the state to 25 people, effective Nov. 15. Masks are now required for everyone age 5 and older, rather than age 10 and older.
New York‘s court system issued plans to indefinitely halt most in-person proceedings, including jury duty.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum issued a mask mandate effective Nov. 14 through Dec. 13, as well as capacity limitations for bars, restaurants and event venues.
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott issued an executive order to close bars and clubs and ban multihousehold gatherings of any size, according to The Boston Globe.
2. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is reopening the state’s field hospital after it went inactive roughly five months ago, according to The Boston Globe. The 240-bed facility at the DCU Center in Worcester should be primed to accept patients the first week of December.
3. The recent widespread surge of COVID-19 cases across most of the U.S. is prompting several states to adjust plans for schooling. Detroit, Boston and Baltimore have shut down or scaled back in-person learning because of increases in coronavirus cases, the Wall Street Journalreports. New York City’s mayor warned parents Nov. 13 that the schools could be closed as soon as Monday if COVID-19 cases continued their climb.
4. Wisconsin’s field hospital, which opened Oct. 14 on the state fairgrounds in West Allis, currently has 15 patientsunder its roof, Wisconsin Public Radio reports. The site could accommodate 50 patients upon opening; as operations ramped up it could take up to 530. WPR reports that the facility is too far for some patients from central and Northern Wisconsin, while others have refused to go to the field hospital even after education about how the alternate care site could free up hospital beds for those who are critically ill.
5. Fewer systems and clinician communities have the option to send help. The geographic distribution of COVID-19 activity means it is less likely that hospitals could deploy a similar strategy to the first and second surges earlier this year, in which medical professionals traveled to reinforce care teams in cities and areas that were in the height of crisis. “We haven’t extended the request, but I’m confident that there’s no one that could come to help,” Jeff Jensen, MD, a critical care physician who splits his time between Mayo Clinic Rochester and Mayo Clinic Health System in La Crosse, Wis., told Bloomberg. “They would be busy taking care of the local issues in their community.”
More people in the US are hospitalized with the coronavirus than at any other time.
More Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 than at any other point in the pandemic, a grim indicator that the third big wave of cases in the US may be the worst wave to date.
On November 11, 65,368 people across the United States were in the hospital after testing positive for the novel coronavirus, according to data reported by the Covid Tracking Project. That’s significantly higher than the last peak of 59,940 recorded on April 15, when the New York City area was the epicenter of the US outbreak. (As the Covid Tracking Project notes, the national and state hospital data have been erratic and incomplete, and reported totals may continue to shift.)
What’s clear from the data is that Covid-19 migrated across the country to new hot spot regions this fall. In the spring, hospitalizations were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northeast. In the summer, more than half of hospitalized Covid-19 patients were in the South and West: states like Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, and Texas.
Now the Midwest, Great Plains, and Mountain West are the new hot spots, but some former hot spots are warming back up as well, with cases and hospitalizations surging again. “There’s so many places, with so many people, that the numbers are just drastically higher,” said Daniel McQuillen, an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts and a senior physician in the division of infectious diseases at Beth Israel Lahey Health, at a Wednesday Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing.
As of November 11, Texas had the highest number of hospitalizations of any state (6,779), and Illinois was in second place with 5,042 people in the hospital; other Midwestern states like Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin have seen record spikes in cases in recent weeks and now have more than 2,000 people hospitalized each.
“The hospitalization number is the best indicator of where we are,” Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Vox this summer. That’s because it’s a better measurement of the severity of the pandemic than Covid-19 testing, which only finds a fraction of cases and includes more mild cases. “We’re going to go to new heights in the pandemic that we haven’t seen before. Not that what we saw before wasn’t horrifying enough.”
Some states like Utah and North Dakota have lower total hospitalizations but also fewer hospitals and hospital beds — and they’re now reaching a woeful tipping point of hospitals stretched to maximum capacity.
“Here in Salt Lake City, we provide a lot of [specialized infectious disease and ICU care] to people in four states as far away as Montana, Arizona, and Wyoming … and our hospitals and caregivers are extraordinarily stressed,” Andrew Pavia, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said at the IDSA briefing. “Our ICUs are full, but that includes overflow ICUs that have been purpose-built, taking advantage of the time we’ve had to plan.”
This was, unfortunately, to be expected (although it wasn’t inevitable). As the weather has turned cooler and states failed to fully control their outbreaks, transmission picked up when people moved indoors. Nearly all the states currently experiencing an increase in new cases and hospitalizations also did not experience major outbreaks in the spring or summer, so residents were less fearful and took less action to prevent the spread of the virus.
“There was a political climate where there’s distrust of government and reluctance to take harsh measures,” in places like Utah, said Pavia. “Many of these states did not have mask mandates until very recently, and some don’t even have them today and have very limited restrictions on mass gatherings.”
Deaths are ticking up again too, reaching 1,592 on November 11, reversing a steady decline that had begun in early May after the first wave and in August after the second wave.
Cumulatively, 10.2 million Americans have tested positive for Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and more than 233,000 of them have died. With hospitalizations surging and several states reporting thousands of new cases a day, experts say we are in for a difficult late fall and winter.
The new hospitalizations, and the untenable pressure they’re putting on the health care system, are also a reminder of how critical it is for states to implement and enforce measures like mandatory face masks, restrictions on bars and restaurants, and for the federal government to fix testing and contact tracing problems. “It should be an all-points bulletin to really bear down on this, because otherwise there’s no limit on where this might go,” said Topol.
Hospitals are running out of staff and beds for Covid-19 patients
The good news is that infectious disease experts think many hospitals are better prepared to handle surges in Covid-19 patients than they were in the spring. For the most part, they have the equipment they need and they know how to deploy it. They also have more standardized protocol for treating the sickest patients.
Yet hospitals in hot spots across the country are maxing out their staff, equipment, and beds, with doctors and nurses 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.
“The surge of Covid-19 patients takes away from our ability to care for the sick patients that are already in Arkansas,” said a nurse at a major health system in Little Rock, who asked to go unnamed fearing retaliation from her employer. “We have so many nurses quarantined that we’re not able to staff our oncology unit appropriately, and our patients are being negatively affected. Covid-19 is right now overburdening our healthcare system in Arkansas.”
Hospitals in several states are also straining to find enough specialists to treat the very sick Covid-19 patients. “ICU beds don’t take care of people — you need staff,” said Pavia of the University of Utah School of Medicine. “And one of the things that many of the Western states have in common is a relative shortage of the people we need to take care of very sick people during a pandemic like this: ICU doctors, probably most importantly ICU nurses, and infectious disease physicians, respiratory therapists. These folks have been working flat out for eight or nine months, and three months into the surge, they’re exhausted, they’re stressed.”
Staffing is a universal problem in hot spots. Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah said the state will have to bring in out-of-state nurses to help with the surge, and officials and health care providers in South Dakota, Tennessee, Arizona, and Wisconsin are requesting them too:v
In Texas, officials are setting up medical tents in El Paso and Lubbock in response to the rapid rise in hospitalized Covid-19 patients and a dwindling number of hospital beds. “El Paso, Texas, is almost completely out of ICU beds; Lubbock, the same thing,” said McQuillen.
“We are the 11th-largest city in the state of Texas and we have two field hospitals on their way to town,” Jarrett Atkinson, Lubbock’s city manager, told KCBD on Tuesday. “I can absolutely assure you that never in my career did I think we would be deploying field hospitals to Lubbock, Texas.”
According to McQuillen, both El Paso and Lubbock have been “much less stringent with their populations [mandating] simple things like wearing masks, and socially distancing.” He compared that to Massachusetts and other Northeast states where he says strict measures during the spring surge made a big difference in reversing the steep climb in cases and hospitalizations. Yet too many states ignored that critical lesson, and now are paying the price.
Daily deaths are creeping up again but are still far below the earlier peak
While daily Covid-19 hospitalizations are surging, another key metric, daily deaths, reached 1,562 on November 11, the highest it has been since May during the first surge, according to the Covid Tracking Project. It’s an ominous sign that deaths could reach unprecedented levels in the coming weeks and months, given that cases and hospitalizations are now at new highs.
It’s possible, experts say, that fewer people who are hospitalized will end up dying in this winter stage of the pandemic as compared to the spring. As Vox’s Julia Belluz reported, there have been significant improvements in mortality in the US and Europe in the past several months, as doctors’ understanding of Covid-19 and how to treat it has improved:
Though there’s still a lot of progress to be made, the treatment approach has become more standardized over time, said Jen Manne-Goehler, an infectious disease doctor at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General hospitals. When she started treating Covid-19 patients in the spring, it felt like practice was changing every few days. Now it’s more streamlined — and that’s undoubtedly helping with survival, too.
That said, if hospitals in the hard-hit states run out of beds and staff to treat the incoming flow of patients, more people who could have been saved may die. When ICU staff were stretched in the spring, “ICU patients just didn’t get the same attention,” intensive care doctor Lakshman Swamy, who works with the Cambridge Health Alliance, told Belluz.
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HENRY KOTULA 