State COVID-19 surge throttles holiday plans, has area healthcare workers seeking relief
Pierce County’s latest COVID-19 surge is revealing the strains of both a public weary of safety measures and a health system leery of what’s ahead as the full brunt has yet to be seen.
After shattering single-day new case total records locally last weekend with a record one-day total above 200, that benchmark was soon eclipsed, edging past 300 on Saturday.
Statewide, the tallies are just as grim, with another record high for the state in new cases posted on Friday, and Pierce County among the top in cumulative cases.
All of this has led to more warnings from both Gov. Jay Inslee and the state Department of Health, imploring residents to keep a lid on holiday celebrations and in-person gatherings.
New emergency restrictions were announced by Inslee on Sunday involving indoor dining, gatherings, retail and gyms.
“Just two weeks ago, we announced 1,000 new cases in a day for the first time since mid-summer. And, each day this week we have reported over 1,000 new cases per day. This rapid escalation is extremely alarming,” the state Department of Health said late Friday.
A Western compact of sorts already has been created to also help slow the spread.
According to Friday’s situation report issued by the state Emergency Operations Center, Inslee joined California’s and Oregon’s governors “in urging visitors entering their states or returning home from travel outside these states to self-quarantine to slow the spread of the virus.”
But adhering to rules seems to be tough even for at least one of them. California Gov. Gavin Newsom was recently called out for attending a birthday party that didn’t adhere to crowd size limits.
“While our family followed the restaurant’s health protocols and took safety precautions, we should have modeled better behavior and not joined the dinner,” he said later in a statement, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Inslee on Thursday underscored the seriousness of the situation of gatherings.
“We are in as dangerous a position today as we were in March,” Inslee said Thursday evening during a brief statewide televised address. “We cannot wait until our hospitals’ halls are lined with gurneys waiting for rooms before we take decisive action.
“Please don’t gather with people outside your household. It’s too dangerous.”
By the numbers
Since Oct. 17, the first triple-digit day for new cases in Pierce County since August, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has reported daily triple-digit totals for new cases for all but nine days.
Those lower-case-total days have been attributed to lab slowdowns on the weekends.
The data point to how disease growth has soared. Multiple labs run countless tests on a daily basis with 235,837 tests run for Pierce County residents since March.
Of that, Pierce County COVID-19 testing data show that 39,666 tests have been run just at the county’s mobile testing stations alone since July 1:
▪ July: 5,601
▪ August: 7,865
▪ September: 7,259
▪ October: 11,374
▪ November (as of Nov. 12): 7,567
As of Friday, there were an estimated 3,421 still-active cases in Piece County, which the health department calculates by counting total cases and subtracting those likely recovered (defined as 28 days since case report date) and deaths.
That’s nearly 28 percent of all the cases the county has recorded since March.
Dr. Joshua Dill, a pulmonary and critical care physician with MultiCare, told The News Tribune that as far as patients in the third wave go, “we’re still seeing much more of a younger population. Now, probably age ranges, in the 40-60 age range category, where maybe earlier on it would have been higher.”
There’s a steady stream of COVID-19 patients.
“As an ICU service, we split our patient loads, but I would say it could be between, you know, two to six, between each doctor, each day,” Dill said.
He says the trend of patients skewing younger indicates “older adults are certainly taking more precaution, because they realized early on that those are much higher risk for mortality.”
Healthcare workers feel the strain
Those on the front lines are ramping up their calls for more decisive action.
On Friday, at least two unions issued statements calling for rapid workplace change, with one going so far as to call for a strike.
The Union of American Physicians and Dentists, representing a number of physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants who work at MultiCare Indigo Urgent Care facilities, announced on Friday plans to strike at 20 of the system’s 34 clinics Nov. 23-24.
The union, which has been in lengthy negotiations with the health system, repeated its charges on Friday of facing an “assembly-line approach” to health care that’s continued in the pandemic.
MultiCare has rejected the union’s characterizations, and on Friday said its “top priority in our negotiations with UAPD has always been a fair contract that supports staff and patient safety and the communities we serve.”
In separate action Friday, the Washington State Nurses Association continued calls for workplace improvements and improved reimbursement for nurses in the pandemic.
The union represents registered nurses in the area including St. Joseph Medical Center, part of Tacoma-based CHI Franciscan’s health system.
That hospital has been dealing with COVID-19 cases discovered among 23 staff members and at least four patients since October.
In a statement Friday, WSNA said that it “is already hearing concerns from some of our nurses that hospitals aren’t making proper personal protective equipment available, and that they are falling short on timely testing for COVID-19 and rapid reporting of results.
“Many of our nurses have depleted their paid time off to cover furloughs, the closure of elective surgeries early this year and for illness, including from contracting COVID-19 themselves,” the union said.
“Support for nurses must include paid administrative leave when they have to be in quarantine with the presumption that nurses testing positive acquired COVID-19 through work as a frontline caregiver — not out in the community, as some hospitals continue to argue.”
As more evidence of the financial pressures, WSNA added that: “The Washington State Nurses Foundation has received so many requests for financial help from our Nurses Emergency Assistance Grant Fund that we had to shut down applications within hours of announcing it.”
Doctors’ perspective and adjusting plans
Dr. Peter Barkett, an internist with the Kaiser Permanente clinic in Silverdale, recalled that previously, “People were really worried in the spring, we were running through PPE, we weren’t sure we were going to have enough ventilators. We’re in a better position now, for sure. But we don’t have inexhaustible resources.”
He noted that everyone needs to focus on the basics, those safety measures learned early on in the pandemic’s start locally in March.
“It’s time to double-down on these containment measures — masking, handwashing, and do a good job with that so that we don’t get into a full-blown emergency.”
“We’re hanging in there,” said Dill of his own MultiCare workplace peers. “It certainly is tough.”
He added that he wanted to acknowledge “all of the staff that we work with … the physicians, the respiratory therapists, the nurses, you know, the nursing assistants, everybody that I work with in the ICU … just shoulder to shoulder to take care of these patients. It has been exhausting, it’s been challenging.
“This kind of year has been a stress test for the medical system, and for taking care of patients in a way that I’ve not experienced in my career. But at the same time, it’s been rewarding. And, you know, we’re getting through it, and we’re a big family. And so there’s just no other option, right? We’re just finding ways to come together, and to be resilient.”
Barkett told The News Tribune this week that he’s limiting his own holiday celebrations to just his immediate family.
“We’re still going to celebrate the holidays, we’re going to do that with my wife, my two kids. But we’re not doing extended family,” he said. “I’ve had these conversations with my family, and they understand that there’s a bit of a responsibility for all of us to help limit the spread of COVID.”
Barkett noted that holidays can be COVID-19’s time to thrive.
‘”If we look back to Fourth of July, even recently at Halloween, we really see a spike in numbers after the holidays when there are gatherings of groups of people.”
As for Dill, “right now we’re making plans to have an outdoor masked celebration on my side of the family ... to be able to have a small gathering to connect with people in a way that is also honoring of appropriate recommendations from public health officials, because we really want to honor how we’re supposed to be doing this in a pandemic and not continue to spread or raise the risk of spreading COVID.“
Barkett added that taking safety precautions over the next few months does not mean people need to hide in their basements.
“Hopefully, they’ll find ways to reach out to friends and family.”
— The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 15, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
