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HEART OF ALENE, Idaho – Kootenai Health is seeing a “critical” increase in hospitalizations related to COVID-19, increasing faster and more severely than last year due to the Delta variant.
Kootenai Health says “August 2021 looks a lot more like December 2020” in reference to when hospital capacity was at 99%, threatening to force health officials to send patients to Washington.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Kootenai Health at 99% capacity, may need to transfer patients to hospitals in Seattle and Portland
“With the increase in trending cases, we are rapidly depleting our staff resources,” said Jon Ness, CEO of Kootenai Health. “The COVID-19 hospital census is increasing at a faster rate than it did last winter. If this trend continues, in just five days we will surpass our previous high COVID-19 count of December 2020. ”
Kootenai Health says they have the highest COVID inpatient volumes in Idaho, double that of the second-busiest hospital, St. Alphonsus in Boise. Kootenai Health saw 68 COVID patients on Monday, 29 of whom needed intensive care.
“We have postponed a lot of elective procedures over the past few weeks due to hospital capacity,” said Joan Simon, chief nurse at Kootenai Health. “We are now postponing all elective procedures which can wait six to eight weeks so that we can redeploy staff to care for inpatients.”
The hospital has reached near maximum capacity since the spring due to community growth and delayed care from the onset of the pandemic. Associated with an increase in COVID infections and Simon has had to relocate staff to help cope with the influx of patients.
“We need help finding enough nurses to support the increased volumes of critical care and acute care patients,” said Jeremy Evans, director of regional operations for Kootenai Health.
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