High Covid hospitalizations delayed elective surgeries



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Due to her condition, she chokes easily and has difficulty breathing. “I cry all the time because of my situation,” she said.

Added to the physical discomfort is his frustration that so many people in his condition do not get vaccinated against Covid, and fall ill and occupy hospital beds.

According to the latest data from federal and state health officials, only 66% of adults in Georgia have received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to 77% of all adults in the United States who have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

“They punish people like me,” Ms. Strong said.

In some regions, doctors explicitly ration care. Idaho state officials on Thursday extended “standards of crisis care” across the state, a standard that had been limited to the northern part of the state earlier this month. “We do not have enough resources to adequately treat patients in our hospitals, whether you are there for Covid-19 or a heart attack or because of a car accident”, Dave Jeppesen, director of the health department and the welfare of Idaho. , said in a statement.

With few intensive care beds available, hospitals in Idaho had largely stopped providing hernia surgeries or hip replacements before the new order. Now they are also postponing cancer and heart surgeries, said Brian Whitlock, executive director of the Idaho Hospital Association. The hospitals there “have done their best,” he said.

In Alaska, the state’s largest hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, has also started rationing care as patients wait hours to get to the emergency room and doctors scramble to find beds. “As we do our best, we are no longer able to provide quality care to every patient who needs our help,” hospital medical staff said in a letter to the community in mid -September.

When the pandemic first hit hospitals last year, many institutions found no alternative to postponing non-essential procedures. “We weren’t sure what we were really going to face,” said Dr. Matthias Merkel, senior associate chief medical officer for capacity management and patient flow at Oregon Health & Science University, on Portland State University Medical Center. “We have preventively stopped elective surgeries and emptied hospitals. “

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