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Hospitalizations for COVID-19 jumped to 847 on Monday in Minnesota, which sees the toll rise from a wave of delta-variant coronavirus that falls in other hard-hit states.
While the latest COVID-19 patient count is lower than the record 1,864 at the end of November, it is the highest total in Minnesota since January 1 – when a limited vaccine was just starting to be distributed to workers health care providers and residents of long-term care facilities. .
Health system leaders urged unvaccinated Minnesotans to get vaccinated – both against COVID-19 and the upcoming seasonal flu – to provide relief to hospitals stricken by the pandemic and patients with other medical needs urgent. Almost 95% of intensive care beds in Minnesota were occupied on Monday by patients with COVID-19 or unrelated medical conditions.
“We are so busy with everything else. Our total number of occupied hospital beds are operating at a higher level for much longer than what we had to deal with during the height of the pandemic,” said Dr Mark Sannes. , an infectious. disease specialist leading the COVID-19 response for Bloomington-based HealthPartners.
Unvaccinated people made up three-quarters of the 379 COVID-19 patients admitted in the past 30 days to HealthPartners hospitals, including the St. Paul and Methodist areas of St. Louis Park. Although they are younger, HealthPartners unvaccinated patients also suffered more serious illness, accounting for 79% of COVID-19 patients requiring intensive care and 85% of those on ventilators.
Allina Health and Sanford Health showed similar trends – the latter reporting just one of 32 fully vaccinated patients on ventilators on Tuesday at its hospitals in Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Gov. Tim Walz and State Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm received flu shots in St. Paul on Tuesday afternoon and encouraged others to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and the flu – which can be administered at the same time. More than 75% of eligible people aged 12 and older have received at least the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in Minnesota, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s especially important this year,” Walz said after getting the vaccine, “when hospital space is at a premium.”
Walz on Tuesday called on legislative leaders to consider measures to deal with the worsening pandemic, including a bonus for caregivers who burn out and leave patient care and also a temporary relaxation of regulations so that hospitals can respond with more beds as needed.
The pressure is spreading to smaller hospitals in Minnesota, which are handling fewer COVID-19 cases but are struggling to transfer patients who need higher-level treatment.
Dr Chris Kaczmarczyk said it took two hours and several calls a week ago to find a hospital that could provide surgery and a convalescent bed for a patient with crippling vascular disease.
“He needed emergency surgery to save a limb, basically,” said Kaczmarczyk, medical director of the emergency department at Cuyuna Regional Medical Center, a critical access hospital in Crosby, Minn. “He didn’t have a bad result from the delay, luckily, but he sure could if it took longer or if he had decompensated” and lost blood flow.
Hospitals handled the first COVID-19 wave of spring 2020 under an emergency order from Walz that suspended elective medical procedures that would otherwise take up beds.
Hospitals took this step on their own during the severe wave of the fall – reducing their total of non-COVID patients to 5,127 on November 29, when there was a record 1,864 COVID-19 patients.
For comparison, there were 6,652 non-COVID patients on Monday, but hospitals were reluctant to disrupt their regular hours. Sannes said there was a group of patients who deteriorated due to delays in care last year.
“Everyone is careful to delay what we consider necessary care. Our experience over the past year and a half is that this group of people needed this care, and when some of them received it more late, we wish they had received them sooner. ” he said.
The rise and fall in COVID-19 cases in the fall and last winter was also correlated with self-reported levels of depression and anxiety in adults, according to a CDC study released Tuesday. Minnesota saw one of the largest increases among states in the severity of depression among adults from August through December last year, the study showed, but went on to experience one of the largest drops in anxiety levels from January to June of this year.
The pandemic has caused 725,451 coronavirus infections and 8,203 COVID-19 deaths in the state, including 12 deaths and 7,133 infections detected over the weekend and reported by the Minnesota Department of Health on Tuesday.
Minnesota had the 10th highest rate of new coronavirus infections in the past seven days compared to other states, according to the latest CDC data, with Iowa and Wisconsin having comparable rates. North Dakota has the third worst rate, while states like Arkansas and Missouri that have experienced severe early delta waves are seeing their infection numbers decline.
A silver lining is that rates have increased more gradually in Minnesota, although the wave could last longer, said Curtis Storlie, developer of the Mayo Clinic’s COVID-19 forecast model.
“Growth is expected to end relatively soon, although it is unlikely to decline as quickly as in other states either,” he said. “That is, we won’t go as high as many states during this delta wave, but it will last longer. Overall, this is a very good thing for our hospital system.”
Minnesota is following federal guidelines and advising third booster doses for people who have received the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and who are 50 years of age or older with underlying health conditions. Recalls may also be offered to young adults with health problems or risks of occupational exposure to the virus.
The booster recommendations for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccine are still under review.
Sannes said boosters were already being offered to healthcare workers, whose risks from COVID-19 were outlined in University of Minnesota research that was published as a preprint earlier this week.
The study looked for COVID-19 antibodies in blood samples from 450 health workers and found their presence doubled to almost 18% over a three-month period ending in mid-February. The risks of infection were higher among intensive care workers and were more common among nurses and paramedics than among doctors.
Jeremy Olson • 612-673-7744
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