Pierce County hospitals facing onslaught of new COVID-19 cases
The latest tsunami of COVID-19 cases in Pierce County has led to more hospitalizations and will eventually mean more deaths by end of year.
On Tuesday, when Pierce County logged 282 new cases and six new deaths, representatives from Tacoma’s rival health systems spoke to The News Tribune about the latest COVID-19 surge and hospitalizations.
At CHI Franciscan, hospitalized cases are up 175 percent since Nov 1, with 124 COVID-19 patients across the system’s eight hospitals as of Nov. 30, the health system posted online Tuesday. That’s up from 111 patients before Thanksgiving.
St. Joseph Medical Center had the system’s most COVID patients with 40 as of Tuesday morning.
“I will be very transparent: It is causing considerable stress across our system,” said Dr. Michael Anderson, CHI Franciscan’s chief medical officer.
When asked if the hospitals had hit capacity or are close to it, Anderson said: “It depends on how you’re going to define capacity because I’ll have to say that in years past, I have seen us hit capacity just because of influenza.”
Anderson said the health system has “temporary bed locations throughout our facilities. Today we’re not utilizing temporary bed locations as a need right now.”
If needed, he said, they can increase capacity ”as much as an additional 10 to 20 percent.”
“If we get into a pinch, we need these temporary locations for patients to be cared for by emergency department nurses, or by surgical post anesthesia care unit nurses in areas that they have the expertise’” in caring for COVID patients, Anderson added.
MultiCare has seen a 136 percent increase in COVID patients since Nov. 1, with 104 COVID patients hospitalized now in its six hospitals in the Puget Sound region. Tacoma General and Good Samaritan in Puyallup are taking the bulk of the patients, with about 40 each.
MultiCare’s Dr. David Carlson, chief physician officer, said in a separate interview his health system was for now managing the influx.
“Our biggest challenge, frankly, is being able to discharge people,” he said. “Almost 20 percent of our inpatient capacity right now is filled with individuals who could be discharged to a long-term care facility. But we can’t get them back to those places, either because they require a couple of negative tests, they’re not willing to take people back, or in some cases we’ve heard that there have been some institutions that have been forced to close or cut back because of a whole host of reasons.”
“We do have quite a few COVID patients in our hospitals,” he said. It’s “not as high as we’ve been. But it’s on the higher side, which we’ve expected.”
Carlson said that “bed capacity is pretty good. And we do have the ability to move it up and down a little bit. We’ve pulled back on certain procedures over the last week, just to make sure that we have a little bit of buffer.”
Anderson noted that for now CHI is not moving to restrict elective surgeries.
“We are able to manage our beds, minute by minute, second by second because we utilize our Mission Control Center to figure out where we have space, and where patients can be moved. Currently we have capacity in our medical surgical beds,” he said. “We still evaluate each patient’s need for surgery, due to the potential of harm, over time.
“We consider whether or not patients really need their surgeries now. ... We constantly re-evaluate the need and urgency.”
More than capacity, the bigger worry for both Anderson and Carlson is staffing.
“It’s not space to put people — it’s the people to take care of them,” said Carlson.
Carlson said one big impact is the system wasn’t able to get as many traveling nurses as it had in previous times.
“That has made a big difference in terms of our staffing.” Carlson said.
Anderson blamed the virus itself.
“Our staff members are going to reflect what’s going on in the community,” he said, referring to staff members who might be sick with COVID-19, as was seen when St. Joseph staff members fell ill, not just from an outbreak within the facility, but in unrelated cases the system blamed on community spread.
“Community prevalence (of COVID-19) does impact our ability to bring more patients in the facility,” Anderson said.
MultiCare’s Auburn Medical Center also saw its own recent outbreak among staff and patients. Carlson said the site had seen a steady stream of COVID patients through the year.
Overall, “Sometimes they’ve been the place with the most (hospitalized) cases, even though they’re one of our smaller hospitals,” Carlson said.
King County’s flurry of cases also has impacted CHI Franciscan.
“Our St. Francis Hospital in Federal Way, they are very busy, “ said Anderson. “So instead of just trying to overload them because locally, other patients are coming in there, for those patients that are willing, we move them to other facilities such as St. Joe’s or St. Anne’s to care for them.”
Amid all the overwhelming work to be done now, there was some good news.
Media representatives from both health systems told The News Tribune they have acquired the much-sought-after deep-freeze units to store some of the multiple types of coronavirus vaccines awaiting final FDA clearance.
“We are poised to begin vaccinating people as soon as possible,” Carlson said. “And the more people that we can vaccinate, the better.”
This story was originally published December 2, 2020 at 5:10 AM.
