‘Losing the COVID battle’: Idaho hospitals strained beyond capacity with new infections
Hospitals around Idaho are stretched nearly to their breaking points, and hospital administrators fear the worst is yet to come, health care officials said in a joint press conference Thursday afternoon.
As the highly contagious delta variant continues to surge throughout the state, hospital staffs are facing extraordinary circumstances, having to make room for additional patients beyond their capacity limits as large numbers of COVID-19-positive cases and other critically ill patients crowd their wards. Gov. Brad Little earlier this week re-activated the National Guard and secured additional contract workers to help understaffed hospitals — but warned it may not be enough.
The crisis has prompted hospital leaders to warn the public that patients who arrive at emergency rooms will experience longer wait times than normal.
Dr. Steven Nemerson, chief clinical officer at Saint Alphonsus Health System, said health care providers are facing the “most extreme” conditions the state has ever experienced.
“I must tell you that we are losing the COVID battle, and patients are dying unnecessarily,” he said.
And based on modeling conducted by the hospital, the surge is likely to continue through the month of September.
“We are not even close to the worst, and that scares us,” said Richard Augustus, chief medical officer of Caldwell’s West Valley Medical Center.
“Every hospital in Idaho has some level of staffing shortage when it comes to available beds,” Toni Lawson, vice president of governmental relations at the Idaho Hospital Association, told the Idaho Statesman in an interview on Aug. 25. “Right now it’s a bit of a perfect storm. … We have seen kind of exponential growth in the number of patients needing top-level care.”
Last week, Kootenai Health in North Idaho announced it had converted its largest classroom into a 22-patient care unit.
After pausing elective surgeries “weeks ago,” this week Saint Al’s made the decision to also delay medically necessary but time-sensitive procedures while the surge continues. The hospital’s care teams are burdened beyond full capacity, meaning that patient and caregiver encounters are reduced, according to Saint Alphonsus spokesperson Mark Snider.
At St. Luke’s Health System hospitals in the Treasure Valley and Elmore County, certain elective surgeries and procedures are also on pause. As of Thursday, nearly half of the patients in the hospital system have COVID-19, making it difficult for doctors to treat patients with other emergencies, like heart attacks or strokes, according to Dr. Frank Johnson, chief medical officer at St. Luke’s for Boise, Mountain Home and McCall. Of the 430 adults in the system on Thursday, 200 of them have COVID-19.
“It’s impossible for us to provide the other types of care that we ordinarily would,” Johnson said.
Different than last time
While Idaho hospitals experienced a surge of COVID-19 cases last winter, hospital leaders stressed Thursday that the situation now is markedly different. With the wide availability of vaccines that health experts say are highly effective at preventing severe illness, the current COVID-19 hospitalizations are almost entirely preventable.
“We continue to lose people who didn’t have to die,” Augustus said. “We continue to comfort families about a death that didn’t have to happen.”
Hospitalizations, ICU patients and patients on ventilators with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 are all at the highest point since the pandemic began and continue to climb, according to the Department of Health and Welfare. COVID-19 patients also seem to be getting younger, public health officials have said, in part because the vaccine rates among younger populations remain low. But Nemerson also said the delta variant appears to have a “predilection” for younger people and is much more contagious.
Hospital leaders at St. Luke’s, Saint Al’s and West Valley Medical Center all said that about 95% of their patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated. At Saint Al’s, 99% of patients in intensive care are unvaccinated, and no vaccinated patients have died from COVID-19, Nemerson said.
“We went into (health care) to care for people, to help people, to save them, and we can’t,” Augustus said. “It feels sometimes like we’re rearranging chairs on the Titanic.”
This story was originally published September 2, 2021 at 5:37 PM.
