A closer look at a state in crisis and a possible preview for others.
All around the United States, hospitals are filling up quickly. According to numbers published by the US Department of Health and Human Services, around 78% of the staffed inpatient hospital beds and 81% of the ICU beds nationwide are occupied. While these are the highest hospital occupancy rates recorded at any time during the Covid-19 pandemic, they actually appear to be low-ball estimates. There seems to be a disconnect between the official data made available to the public and what’s happening on the ground.
The reason for this is unacceptable delays in reporting. HHS and other agencies have always acknowledged that public reports on hospital capacity—for Covid-19 and all other conditions—actually reflect data that are 1-2 weeks old. But until now, such lags rarely mattered because most hospitals haven’t had to operate near or above 100% capacity routinely, even during the pandemic. Under normal circumstances, whether a hospital was 65% or 75% full does not make much of a difference, though as the numbers creep up, care can be compromised. And even in past moments when capacity was closer to 100%, a wave of Omicron-driven Covid-19 was not headed towards hospitals.
Many hospital systems are teetering on the edge, due to a combination of Covid and non-Covid care. As I told New York Magazine last week, I wish I could say I knew hospital capacity would not become a major catastrophe in the coming week or two. Unfortunately, as of now, I can’t be sure and so I can’t say that. That uncertainty—the notion that I do not actually know whether hospitals will truly be able to provide adequate care to everyone that needs it—is unprecedented and worrying.
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Let’s focus on Maryland, where the Governor declared a 30-day state of emergency last week. According to HHS, 87% of the state’s hospital beds are occupied. But my team’s Covid-19 Hospital Capacity Circuit Breaker Dashboard (which I first conceived of when writing an Inside Medicine entry just 3 weeks ago, and built out since with the help of Benjy Renton and Harvard epidemiologist Bill Hanage) shows that every single county in Maryland appears to be over 100% capacity. The reason we project that things are bad is that we monitor the change in Covid-19 cases over the last week or so to “nowcast” what we think has happened in any region since the last HHS update.
Our model shows Maryland ought to be in crisis mode.
Is it? Well, I’m not there. But there are two indicators that the scene is bad, more in line with our model than with HHS’s outdated data.
First, in the region of Maryland where, among others, Johns Hopkins Medical Center is, there have been red alerts issued in 21 of 23 facilities, indicating that beds full. “Red alerts” mean that beds are so full that even patients with heart conditions are unable to have real-time telemetry monitoring, which could be dangerous for some patients.
For one, the hospitals are overwhelmed because every time someone gets a sniffle they are rushing to the hospital because the fear mongering media has convinced them they are going to die from COVID. Secondly, the hospitals created this problem too by firing those who refused to get the vaccine. You don’t get to fire 10-15% of your staff during the busiest time of need and then cry about how understaffed and overworked you are.
Were all fired? Check your facts.
You must be one of those hospital administration vaccination Nazis. Getting forced to “resign” and getting fired is the same.
If we were allowed to get the monacronal antibody drugs, there would be no need for covid patients to have to be in the hospital. It would cure people quickly. But the government has decided that you have to sit and beg, for it, and you still won;t get it.,…………….because the democrats said so!!!!!