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Raleigh, North Carolina – Hospitals in the region continue to fight the growing number of COVID-19 patients flocking to emergency rooms and occupying beds in intensive care units.
More than 3,500 people statewide were being treated for COVID-19 in North Carolina hospitals on Monday, state officials said. This figure is up 10% from a week ago and is more than triple the number of a month ago.
“We have so many COVID patients coming in which is really saturating the whole system,” said Dr David Kirk, deputy chief medical officer of WakeMed.
WakeMed has nearly 200 COVID-19 patients, Kirk said, and 85 to 90 percent of them have not been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
The system used a dozen patient beds in the lobby of its main hospital in Raleigh as a makeshift emergency room.
“We can create more space. We have a lot of supplies. What we don’t have, due to the nationwide staff shortage, is more people,” Kirk said. “You can’t recruit enough people, so the people who are here just have to work longer and have to work harder.
“Our staff are exhausted. They are frustrated. They are tired,” he added.
The situation is similar at Vidant Medical Center in Greenville, where President Brian Floyd said 172 patients have COVID-19, 45 are in intensive care and 21 are in intensive care. Ninety percent of these patients are unvaccinated, he said.
“We are now back to the levels we saw before we had a vaccine,” said Floyd, noting that he was speaking on behalf of the thousands of “dedicated and emotionally exhausted team members”.
“We are seeing more death and suffering in our intensive care units than we have ever seen before,” said Dr Ogugua Obi, who heads the medical intensive care unit at Vidant.
Dr Matthew LeDoux, director of pediatrics at Vidant Health’s Maynard Children’s Hospital, said he worked a shift last week in which three teenagers, all unvaccinated, were admitted to the hospital. USI. A newborn baby infected by a family member was also in the hospital, he said.
“We have been incredibly lucky and grateful that we haven’t yet lost a child to COVID-19, but if the current trajectory continues, we will lose a child,” LeDoux said.
UNC Health Southeastern in Lumberton has seen so many deaths from COVID-19 recently that hospital administrators rented a mobile mortuary over the weekend because the hospital’s usual morgue is full.
“We saw the number of deaths increase last week to a level that we knew would exceed anything we had experienced in the past,” said Joann Anderson, president and chief medical officer of the hospital. “We didn’t want to get to the point where we wouldn’t have space for a body in the event of a patient’s death and we had to hold them for a period of time before a funeral home could come and pick them up.”
Anderson said the hospital morgue would have one or two bodies on a normal day, but had 11 on Monday – one less capacity. All of those deaths were linked to the coronavirus, she said.
Robeson County has the lowest vaccination rate in North Carolina at just 29%. Statewide, 60% of adults 18 or older are fully immunized.
“Having such a low vaccination rate makes us an extremely vulnerable population, and that is what we are currently seeing with the numbers that we are seeing,” Anderson said, noting that she had seen cars lined up for testing. virus screening when she drove to work on Monday.
“It just worries me to have so many people who need to be tested [and] I don’t have a line for people to get vaccinated, ”she said.
Doctors at the three hospitals urged people who have not been vaccinated to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
“A person who gets vaccinated will personally save lives,” Kirk said. “They will save lives by preventing others from becoming infected, but also by preventing people and health workers from becoming infected and by preventing children in schools from becoming infected.”
“Please consider vaccination as an option,” said Anderson.
“Please, please, please take the vaccine. Don’t become a statistic,” Obi said. “It is preventable. It is not necessary.”
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