A rising tide of new coronavirus cases is flooding emergency rooms in parts of the United States, with some patients being moved to the hallways and nurses working additional shifts to keep up with the increase.
Patients struggling to breathe are being placed on ventilators in emergency rooms as intensive care units are full, officials say, and the near-constant care they require is overloading workers who are also treating ER cases more. typical like chest pains, infections and fractures.
In Texas, Dr. Alison Haddock of Baylor College of Medicine said the current situation is worse than after Hurricane Harvey, which flooded Houston with flooding in 2017. The state reported a new daily record of virus deaths on Friday. and more than 10,000 confirmed cases for the fourth consecutive day.
“I have never seen anything like this increase in COVID,” said Haddock, who has worked in emergency rooms since 2007. “We are doing our best, but we are not an ICU.”
Patients are waiting “hours and hours” to be admitted, he said, and less ill people are lying on beds in the hallways to accommodate the more seriously ill.
Around Seattle, which was the country’s first hot spot for the virus that causes COVID-19, A new wave of patients is breaking out in emergency departments, said nurse Mike Hastings.
“What is really frustrating for me is when a patient comes into the emergency department and doesn’t really have COVID symptoms, but he feels like he needs that test,” said Hastings, who works at an area hospital and is president. of the Association of Emergency Nurses. “Sometimes we can’t test them because we don’t have enough test supplies, so we’re only testing a certain set of patients.”
In another state, Florida, which is seeing an increasing number of cases, hospitals say they desperately need remdesivir, a drug that has been shown to reduce average hospitalization times, to treat coronavirus patients who are filling beds.
In response, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that 30,000 vials of the drug were shipped to the state, enough to treat about 5,000 patients.
On Saturday, Florida reported more than 10,200 new cases of the virus and 90 additional deaths, while Missouri recorded 958 new pandemic cases in a single day. Arizona, which conducts periodic reviews of death certificates, reclassified 106 deaths as COVID-19, bringing the number of deaths reported Saturday to 147.
Confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide have exceeded 14 million, and deaths approached 600,000, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University. On Friday, the World Health Organization reported a record of new infections in a single day at more than 237,000. The true cost of the pandemic is believed to be higher, in part due to a paucity of evidence and deficiencies in data collection.
The United States, Brazil and India top the list of cases. South Africa, with 337,000 cases, about half of all confirmed infections in Africa, was ready to join the top five countries most affected by the pandemic.
In the United States, where infections are on the rise in many Sunbelt states, Megan Jehn, an associate professor of epidemiology at Arizona State University in Tempe, said it is important to monitor visits to the emergency room, as increases there They may indicate that the virus is spreading faster.
But it’s hard to get a complete picture of how emergency rooms are doing in many places. In Arizona, one of the few states reporting data on emergency room visits for people with confirmed or suspected symptoms of COVID-19, the numbers began to rise in early June and peaked earlier this month. More than 2,000 people went to an emergency room with coronavirus symptoms in a single day, July 7.
On Friday, COVID-19-related hospitalization figures for Arizona were close, but below recent records established after the state became a national hot spot.
Dr. Robert Hancock, who works at various hospitals in Texas and Oklahoma and serves as president of the Texas College of Emergency Physicians, said that some Texas emergency rooms face backups of patients awaiting ICU beds. And many of them are on ventilators, which means they require more care than other patients.
“Unfortunately, due to the increased demand for staff, there is generally no one free to go to the emergency room to help many times from a nursing point of view,” he said.
Burnout could wait for these healthcare workers, as it did in New York City, when it was the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak in the spring.
Emergency room doctors and nurses were surprised by the relentless stream of seriously ill patients during shifts that often lasted 12 hours, said Dr. Bernard P. Chang of the Columbia University Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.
“You were on high alert the entire shift,” said Chang. “It was a brutal and sustained battle.”
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Associated Press writers Kevin McGill in New Orleans, Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix, and Carla K. Johnson in Seattle contributed to this report.
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