As COVID-19 filled Idaho hospitals, helicopters and ambulances worked overtime
Idaho’s small-town hospitals were teetering on the edge in late October. Too many people were coming to the hospital with COVID-19, needing oxygen and fluids and beds.
The coronavirus pandemic strained hospitals large and small, forcing them to hunt for open beds elsewhere in the state and region. They relied on helicopters, airplanes and ground ambulances for help getting patients the medical care they needed, as COVID-19 hot spots waxed and waned.
Data tracked by the Idaho Statesman showed a rise in air ambulance flights last fall, based on flight records from flightaware.com. During one week in mid-September, eight medical helicopters tracked by the Statesman made at least 57 trips to, from and between Idaho hospitals.
That doesn’t count the many ambulances that took COVID-19 patients to and from hospitals around the region, as overwhelmed facilities like St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center were forced to move patients.
“We run a 10-day average daily rate, and this year compared to years prior, we’re running 20-25% higher volume,” said Blaine Patterson, St. Luke’s director of emergency medical services. “Mainly, it was the result of COVID and COVID-like illnesses.”
Moving Idaho patients in a pandemic
One hospital in the farming town of Rupert sent patient after patient to the nearby regional hospital. Another critical access hospital in the outdoor-tourism town of Salmon waited for air ambulances to arrive — several times, having to use an emergency ventilator to keep patients alive when their oxygen levels crashed.
“We’re seeing upwards of six COVID-positives in the ER every 24 hours, and one — if not two or three — is needing to be admitted,” Minidoka Memorial Hospital CEO Tom Murphy told the Statesman in late October. The hospital reached a saturation point, he explained then. “We’re in a situation that we’re transferring every one of our patients who needs to be admitted.”
Air St. Luke’s transported 186 patients with lab-confirmed COVID-19 between March and early December, Patterson said. Those were patients sick enough to need a higher level of care — a patient in McCall or Sun Valley who needed to be put on a ventilator in Boise, for example.
More patients, still, had to be transported by Magic Valley Paramedics on the ground in the Twin Falls region, he said.
Another burden of COVID-19: costly rides
Air St. Luke’s has bases in Boise and Twin Falls, operating the air and ground transport network for St. Luke’s Health System. (St. Luke’s also operates Magic Valley Paramedics.) The Life Flight Network, partly owned by Saint Alphonsus Health System, has air ambulance bases in Boise, Burley and Rexburg.
Ambulance services can be costly, as much as tens of thousands of dollars for helicopter or airplane transport.
The trips are generally covered by health insurance plans when they’re deemed medically necessary — when someone needs a ventilator, or a hospital doesn’t have enough beds to care for them.
But some insurance plans require hefty out-of-pocket payments from the patient. The services sell memberships to the public. They cost less than $100 a year and cover air ambulance services in the Western region through the Association of Air Medical Membership Programs.
Coronavirus up, other emergencies down
If you noticed more choppers flying over Boise in the fall, it may have been due to coronavirus activity. But the air ambulances have always been busy — picking up injured hikers or crash victims, taking heart attack patients to a hospital with higher-level cardiac care, even making deliveries for organ transplants throughout the region.
Life Flight Network actually noticed a drop in demand since the start of the pandemic. There was a sharp drop in the spring, when hospitals also noticed fewer people coming in with medical emergencies.
“However, as we entered into early summer, I would say volumes returned to close to normal status,” said Michael Weimer, regional vice president for Life Flight.
“I don’t know that since the pandemic started, that we’ve ever come back to normal flight volume,” Weimer said in an interview just before Christmas. “Now, we’re at the point where as facilities are close to being at capacity, they start moving patients so they make room” for more patients.
New ‘layer of complexity’ for Idahoans in scary situations
The frontline medical providers who work in the helicopters and ground ambulances have rolled with the changes since COVID-19 arrived in Idaho. They have adapted their vehicles, their personal protective equipment and their safety protocols as they learned more about the virus — that it’s airborne and can stay on surfaces, for example. Like other frontline workers, some of the crew members have gotten sick.
And they’re acutely aware of how the pandemic affects their patients, Patterson said.
“It’s always a little disheartening for people to need to be transferred to a hospital in the state of Idaho, or out of Idaho, and it’s not usually good news,” he said. “It’s been a little more challenging with COVID, because some of our partners won’t allow riders (such as family members to ride along). ... It’s just adding a layer of complexity that we haven’t seen before. You’re seeing people covered head to toe in PPE, and you’re by yourself. ... And it’s been determined that you have an emergency medical condition and you need to be transferred to a new location? That’s scary on its own.”
Weimer said in late December that Life Flight had transported about 600 patients with confirmed coronavirus infections in its region — Idaho, Oregon and Washington.
“The one thing we’ve learned through this pandemic is that we need to take everything one day at a time,” he said. “But we are hopeful that we’ll start to see the positive effects of people getting vaccinated.”
