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MISSION, Kan. (AP) – When COVID-19 patients flooded hospitals in St. Louis, respiratory therapists arriving for another grueling shift with a dwindling supply of ventilators often watched their chores and cried, heading to the locker rooms to recover .
“They were like, ‘Dude, another 12 hours of this job from these dying patients who could go anytime.’ And just knowing they had to take care of themselves with that kind of stress on the back of their head, ”recalled Joe Kowalczyk, a respiratory therapist who sometimes works in a supervisory role.
Today, the number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 in the United States has dropped by 80,000 in six weeks, and 17% of the country’s adult population has received at least one dose of a vaccine, providing some relief to frontline workers like Kowalczyk. On her last shift at Mercy Hospital in Saint-Louis, there were only about 20 coronavirus patients, up from 100 at the height of the winter surge.
“It’s so strange to look back,” he said. “Everyone was definitely out of breath towards the end just because we had been doing it for so long at the end of the year.”
The United States has seen a dramatic turnaround since December and January, when hospitals overflowed with patients after the holiday gatherings and pandemic fatigue caused a spike in cases and deaths. Health officials acknowledge the improvement but stress that hospitalizations are still at about the same level as the earlier peaks in April and July and just before the crisis worsened in November. Deaths are still high, although well below the peak in early January, when they sometimes exceeded 4,000 per day.
Hospitalizations in Missouri were around 3,000 per day for a period from late November to January, but they have since declined by about 60%. As of Monday, 1,202 people were hospitalized, according to state data.
In Wisconsin, hospitalizations have dropped dramatically over the past three and a half months, from 2,277 patients on Nov. 17 to 355 on Wednesday, according to the Wisconsin Hospital Association. And hospital patients are not that sick. The number of intensive care patients has dropped 81% since November 16.
On February 15, state health officials pulled all staff from a field hospital that was set up in October at the state fairgrounds in the suburb of Milwaukee. They stopped before dismantling the facility, fearing the state would see an increase in cases caused by variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.
“It’s a balancing act. You don’t want to shut it down too soon until you really believe we’re on the other side of this pandemic, but we don’t want to tie (the fairground) too long if we really don’t need to. du ”, said Julie Willems Van Dijk, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health Services.
Behind the generally positive trends in hospitalizations, there are worrying signs that the worst may not be over, said Ali Mokdad, professor of health sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“Over the past week, we are seeing the decline slow down,” Mokdad said. In many states, hospitalizations are leveling off or actually increasing.
The biggest driver of the overall decline in hospitalizations in the United States is the behavior of people in December and January, Mokdad said. For the first time in the United States, the shape of the wave is symmetrical, with the fall being as strong as the rise.
“This has not happened before in the previous two waves,” Mokdad said. “For us in the business it’s like ‘Wow, we’re doing something really good right now.’”
In Minnesota, non-intensive care hospitalizations fell from about 1,400 at the end of November to just 233 on Tuesday. The number of intensive care patients has fallen by around 85% since early December to just 59 patients on Tuesday, state data showed.
Hospitalizations in Illinois hovered around 6,000 patients for several days in late November, but fell to 1,488 on Monday, a decrease of about 75%. The number of intensive care patients also fell, from 1,224 on November 25 to just 361 on Monday, according to the state health department.
In hard-hit California, hospitalizations have fallen 70% since January, from 22,821 patients on January 5 to 6,764 on Tuesday. The number of intensive care patients rose from a high of 4,971 on Jan.10 to 1,842 on Tuesday, state data showed.
In Kansas, where many rural hospitals do not have ventilators, the situation was so dire at one point that patients would travel hundreds of miles to seek treatment.
But the number of hospitalizations in the state fell nearly 84%, from 1,282 on Dec. 2 to 208 on Sunday, according to the state’s health department. More than 300 people were in intensive care in December; it’s down to 50 now, according to state data.
“It’s just a little quiet here with COVID,” said medical assistant Ben Kimball, who works primarily at Graham County Hospital in Hill City, a town of about 1,500 in the northwest. rural Kansas.
At the height of the outbreak, he once resorted to sending a patient to a hospital in Denver, about 402 kilometers away. All of the nearby hospitals capable of providing more advanced care were full and were refusing patients.
“We’re pretty lucky, I think,” he said. “I can really feel that things are improving. We aren’t constantly struggling for bed space. We have had a few sighting COVID patients overnight, but we haven’t sent anyone in a moment. “
Kris Mathews, the administrator of Decatur Health, a small hospital in rural northwest Kansas, also spent hours on the phone arranging transfers for patients during the height of the outbreak. Its staff have fallen ill themselves, and those who have worked well overtime to care for coronavirus patients.
“I could feel the weariness and fatigue of the staff,” he wrote. “No one complained to me about it, but I could see them and feel them wearing out.”
It has now been weeks since the hospital treated a patient hospitalized with coronavirus. Thinking back, he said, “I couldn’t be prouder.
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Richmond reported from Madison, Wisconsin. Washington State AP medical writer Carla K. Johnson also contributed to this report.
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