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New York is dangerously close to overwhelming its hospital system with new cases of COVID-19 – and is preparing to re-recruit retired doctors and nurses to the frontlines, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday.
“This is a new phase in the war on COVID,” Cuomo said, adding that daily coronavirus hospitalizations statewide are almost four times what they were in June.
Every hospital in the state needs to start compiling a list of retired doctors and nurses they can draw inspiration from because there are already staffing issues in some areas, Cuomo said.
“I am very concerned about staff shortages,” Cuomo said. “I am more concerned about the staff shortage than I am [number of hospital] beds.
“We can build beds. We cannot create more staff. And the staff are starting to get tired.
About 30,000 healthcare workers flooded New York City at the height of its crisis in the spring, but now “they’re all busy,” Cuomo said, noting coronavirus outbreaks are happening across the country.
Larger hospital systems like H + H in New York and Northwell also need to start balancing their patient loads – meaning they need to distribute people between their sites so that a facility doesn’t get overwhelmed while another has open beds, the governor said.
As the pandemic began to escalate in the spring, Elmhurst Hospital in Queens turned into what healthcare workers called a war zone and ‘collapsed’ under pressure from patients, Cuomo said.
Amid the horror of March 23, the state’s daily coronavirus hospitalization rate reached 3,500 – the same as on Sunday, Gareth Rhodes, special counsel in the State Department of Financial Services, said during the press conference.
By comparison, by June that number had fallen to around 900.
Cuomo said of the required patient load balancing, “This is a mandate from the state Department of Health: you have to distribute the patients in your system.”
Hospitals that fail to comply with the decree could face malpractice charges from the state, the governor said.
“We have been through this nightmare, we have learned from this nightmare, and we are going to correct the lessons we learned during this nightmare,” he said.
Plans are being made again for regional “field hospitals,” Cuomo said at the briefing – where he occasionally played Christmas music and showed photos of Dr Seuss’ Grinch.
Hospitals must come up with plans to increase their bed capacity by 50%, he said.
Cuomo said 65 percent of new cases now come from small “spreading” gatherings.
The state’s positive test rate – which the governor called a key indicator of worrying surges – hit 4.57% on Sunday, the highest since mid-May.
The state has limited even private gatherings indoors and outdoors to 10, although the governor said no one received a ticket over Thanksgiving weekend if they had more.
Cuomo said that while hospitalizations in New York City in the past weren’t all happening everywhere at the same time, then resources could be shifted as needed, “they don’t this time around.
“It’s statewide,” he said of the current hospitalization crisis. “So we’ll have a limited ability to move resources from one north to the other, like we did in the spring… because literally every region has a hospital problem now.
Cuomo said coronavirus hospitalization rates for local areas will now be included in the formula the state uses to decide whether to take lockdown action.
New York City saw its coronavirus hospitalization rate remain stable, with a positive test rate of 4.69% on Sunday – although Mayor Bill de Blasio noted that tests had declined, likely due to the holidays .
De Blasio participated in the governor’s squeeze via Skype – where he said recent tests have been strong overall.
It was the mayor’s first appearance with Cuomo, albeit virtually, since June.
The governor warned that he believed the state had not even started to see the effects of Thanksgiving gatherings.
This should happen within the next week, he said – and the numbers will likely be “significant.”
It will be more than a month before the full fallout from the holiday season, including Christmas, is known, the governor said.
There will be continued pressure on testing, keeping K-8 schools open and better educating the public about small gatherings, Cuomo said.
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