‘There are only so many beds’: COVID-19 surge hits hospitals
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Florida hospitals slammed with COVID-19 patients are suspending elective surgeries and putting beds in conference rooms, an auditorium and a cafeteria. As of midweek, Mississippi had just six open intensive care beds in the entire state.
Georgia medical centers are turning people away, and in Louisiana, an organ transplant had to be postponed along with other procedures.
“We are seeing a surge like we’ve not seen before in terms of the patients coming,” Dr. Marc Napp, chief medical officer for Memorial Healthcare System in Hollywood, Fla., said Wednesday. “It’s the sheer number coming in at the same time. There are only so many beds, so many doctors, only so many nurses.”
Coronavirus hospitalizations are surging again as the more contagious delta variant rages across the country, forcing medical centers to return to a crisis footing just weeks after many closed their COVID19 wards.
The number of people now in the hospital in the U.S. with COVID-19 has almost quadrupled over the past month to nearly 45,000, turning the clock back to early March, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s still nowhere close to the nearly 124,000 people who were in the hospital at the very peak of the winter surge in January, but health experts say this wave is perhaps more worrying because it has risen more swiftly than prior ones. Also, a disturbingly large share of patients this time are young adults.
The vast majority of those now hospitalized are unvaccinated.
Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi alone account for more than 40% of all hospitalizations in the country.
Mississippi has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation, with less than 35% of its population fully inoculated, and Louisiana and Georgia aren’t much better, at around 38%. Florida is closer to the national rate at 49%, but none of the four Southern states comes close to the New England region, where most states are well over 60%.
Across Florida, more than 12,500 patients were hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Thursday, more than 2,500 of them in intensive care. The state is averaging nearly 18,000 newly confirmed infections per day, up from fewer than 2,000 a month ago. In all, Florida has recorded more than 39,100 coronavirus deaths.