US hospitals overloaded by Covid-19

The intensive care unit (ICU) at a hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana. Photo: AP

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, as of August 26, nearly 80% of ICU beds in the country were in use. About 30% of ICU beds (equivalent to 25,000) were reserved for people with Covid-19.

The AP news agency (USA) said that at the time the Delta variant spread, the question was how hospitals would deal with the prospect of overloaded ICUs.

ICUs are specially designed to care for the sickest patients. ICUs are often staffed with specialists and equipment to keep patients alive. There are also machines to monitor breathing and heart rate. A cart with a defibrillator and an intubation tube is always ready if the patient has difficulty breathing or their heart stops.

Patients in the ICU may have just had major surgery, suffered a serious injury from an accident, or contracted Covid-19. Their lungs are damaged, and they need a ventilator. Nurses attend to them, along with pulmonologists, respiratory therapists, and infectious disease specialists.

“It's not just having the staff, but having the right professionals and nurses to be able to care for that individual,” says Nancy Foster of the American Hospital Association.

But overcrowding in the ICU could become a nightmare. Nurses will have to attend to three to four times as many patients as usual, medical staff from other departments will be mobilized, patients will have to wait for beds in the emergency room. Meanwhile, hospitals will be forced to convert many locations into temporary ICUs.

One example is at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Georgia. The surge in Covid-19 patients has forced Phoebe Putney Memorial to use non-professional staff, including the hospital's CEO, Scott Steiner.

Steiner has been tasked with turning Covid-19 patients in the ICU onto their stomachs so their lungs can get more oxygen, a process that sometimes requires up to six people to help, depending on the patient’s weight.

Meanwhile, at Houston Methodist Hospital (Texas), the post-operative room has been converted into an ICU area because Covid-19 patients have taken up half of the ICU beds.

Another problem is the wait for ICU beds in the emergency room. Texas hospital systems have temporarily closed their emergency rooms and reassigned emergency room staff to hospitals that are overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients. Those who come to the emergency room can wait hours and sometimes days for an ICU bed.

Another problem, according to the American Hospital Association, is that ICUs are scarce in rural areas. Less than 3% of ICU beds nationwide are in small, rural hospitals. As a result, larger hospitals often receive requests to help admit patients to their ICUs./.