‘Hospital system overwhelmed’: Utah intensive care unit beds 88% full

MURRAY – Intensive care unit bed utilization at all Utah hospitals is currently 88%, according to the state’s health department report on Monday, while intensive care beds are occupied 92% in the 16 Utah hospitals best equipped to care for COVID-19 patients.

“When the 85% capacity is reached, Utah will be functionally short of intensive care beds, indicating an overwhelmed hospital system,” the state’s coronavirus website says.

Of the 545 Utahns hospitalized with confirmed cases of COVID-19, nearly 200 are receiving intensive care treatment, state health officials reported.

“We have good care and we have a very low case fatality rate, but these things change when we can’t take care of the numbers of patients we can handle,” said Dr. Todd Vento, an infectious disease specialist at Intermountain Healthcare.

Vento said Utah hospitals were doing everything they could to prevent crisis care standards.

“If we get to this stage, it means we have failed,” Vento said. “We failed as a community. We failed in every way because we didn’t stop transmission in our communities and it got to our hospitals.”

The governor is responsible for authorizing the crisis care guidelines, which state: “Critical care / ventilator care must be increasingly focused on those who are most likely to benefit from it, to achieve the goal. of “the greatest good for the greatest number”. “

Utah Hospital Association president Greg Bell has so far said hospitals have risen to the challenge. “If we keep getting these numbers, we’ll just have to start making some tough decisions,” Bell said.

There are concerns about the possibility of an increase in the number of patients, as hospitalizations are a few weeks behind the number of cases. Bell said it is not yet known what the outcome of 3,500 to 4,000 daily cases will be.

“Because what we are seeing now was based on 1,500 to 2,200 cases per day,” Bell said.

“At the end of the day, we still have a lot of COVID transmitted in communities,” Vento said.

Vento said Utahns could help protect the hospital system by not gathering for Thanksgiving.

“Now is the time to really listen to public health experts and say, ‘We can avoid terrible December and January by not doing the things we normally would,” Vento said.

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