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A nurse registers a Covid-19 patient in the Covid ward at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Florida.
Michael S. Williamson | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Dr David Wein, an emergency physician at Tampa General Hospital in Florida, said the Covid-19 outbreak was the most severe he and his colleagues had witnessed since the start of the pandemic.
In Hillsborough County, where Tampa General Hospital is located, the number of new Covid cases has averaged around 1,200 per day, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. This is more than double the national rate after adjusting for the population.
Covid patients now occupy nearly 200 of the 1,041 beds at Tampa General Hospital on Tuesday, according to data provided by the hospital, which serves western Florida and the greater Tampa Bay area. Sixty-one patients are in intensive care. The surge in the number of patients, most of them unvaccinated, is straining the hospital’s more than 8,000 staff, Wein said.
“Everyone’s working at full capacity, then some, and it feels like it’s been that way for a long time,” Wein said Tuesday in a phone interview. He added that the hospital was starting to run out of nurses. “It’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel right now.”
Hospitals across Florida are now being pushed to the limit with intensive care beds filling up and providers struggling to find enough staff to care for patients as state battles one of the worst Covid epidemics -19 of the country, fueled by the highly contagious delta variant.
The surge in Florida cases comes as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to resist calls from the Biden administration and state advocacy groups to enforce mask warrants and other pandemic-related measures to help contain the massive outbreak. He signed a decree and law in May that lifted all Covid restrictions across the state and permanently prevented local authorities from enacting new ones from July 1.
In late July, DeSantis issued a controversial executive order that blocked mandates for masks in state schools, overturning two counties that required face coverings for their students and defying masking recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. DeSantis’ office did not immediately have a comment for this article, and the Florida Department of Health did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Cases continued to climb. Florida’s latest Covid data, which is only released once a week on Friday, shows its seven-day average of new cases hit a new high last week of 19,250 per day, up from around 1,500 in June and accounting for nearly 18% of new cases in the United States, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Per capita, Florida is the second highest in the country with 90 new infections per day per 100,000 population – behind Louisiana with 116 cases per 100,000 population.
DeSantis blamed the Biden administration’s immigration policies for the new wave of Covid infections.
DeSantis’ policies have been “utterly irresponsible,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. He said policies threatened to slow nationwide progress in ending the pandemic, especially as schools reopen and employers start bringing workers back to office this fall.
“With a highly contagious delta variant raging in the state, people have been largely abandoned by their state government,” Gostin said. “America is on the verge of getting back to normal. This could be a major setback for our national response to Covid.”
Hospital beds are filling in the meantime, with 86% of hospital beds used, up from 74% nationally on Wednesday, according to data compiled by the Department of Health and Human Services. In the United States, about 10% of all hospital beds are used to treat Covid patients, while nearly 28% of beds in Florida are occupied by them – the highest of any state, data shows .
Just over 90% of the state’s intensive care beds were in use as of Wednesday, with nearly half of them filled with Covid patients, according to HHS data.
The death toll in Florida is also on the rise with a seven-day average of 88 daily Covid deaths, up 51% from last week but below the record average of over 180 deaths per day at the end of January. , according to data from Hopkins.
The federal government is now sending 200 ventilators, 100 respirators and other related supplies to the state, according to NBC News, to help Florida health officials meet the record number of hospitalizations. DeSantis said he was unaware of the federal allocation, but local and state health officials had requested materials from the national stockpile, according to NBC News.
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