Coronavirus patients are swamping U.S. hospitals in record numbers, straining the health care system much more widely than the first acute outbreaks did in the spring.
The total number of patients in hospitals with Covid-19 nationally has hit new highs every day since Nov. 11, when hospitalizations first exceeded the April peak. There were nearly 84,000 on Sunday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
The surge comes as the Thanksgiving and the December holidays approach, when travel and family visits are expected to accelerate the spread of the virus and further strain hospitals.
With a week of November left to go, the United States has already had its highest monthly case total, reporting more than 3,075,000 new coronavirus cases since Nov. 1, according to a New York Times database. By the time the month is over, the tally could top four million, more than double the number in October.
November’s case total is nearly 2.9 million more than March’s total.
The landscape has changed markedly since March, when the virus was concentrated mainly in outbreaks on the East and West Coasts and in a few big cities like New Orleans and Detroit. In New York City, especially, when hospitals were flooded with patients in the spring, medical workers were flown in from across the nation to help, and the Navy deployed a hospital ship to the city.
Now, though, with the strain being felt nearly everywhere, few hospitals can spare anyone to help in other places, and the focus is on acute shortages of staff, more than of beds.
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.
After months of unrelenting stress from the pandemic, many workers are getting sick themselves, suffering from burnout or even retiring early. Hundreds of nurses near Philadelphia went on strike last week over the trauma of the pandemic, low pay and limited resources.
The military deployed medical crews to help overwhelmed hospitals in El Paso, and the Texas state government has been dispatching thousands of workers to assist in other hard-hit areas of the state. The traveling nurses that some hospitals depend on for crisis staffing are in high demand in many states, and their rates have shot up. Overall, about one-fifth of U.S. hospitals are now short-staffed, according to an NPR analysis of data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Hospitals can set up more beds, but “where they’re going to get stretched is on personnel,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “They just won’t have the people to staff them.”
Angelia Gower, a patient access manager in the SSM Health system in St. Louis, said she has seen the problem firsthand. She has been filling in on night shifts after several of her employees contracted Covid-19 and one lost a parent to the disease, creating both a logistical challenge and a morale crisis for her department.
“That takes a toll, on not just my employee and her life, but all of the staff that knows her,” Ms. Gower said.
Early in the pandemic, she said, her team was strained by furloughs brought on by the financial pressures that the coronavirus put on the hospital system. Those furloughs are over, she said, but “we are still working short-staffed.”
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Hospitals around the U.S. are short of staff, with little relief in sight. - The New York Times
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