‘Preventable wave’ of COVID putting strain on area hospitals. Situation ‘very grave’
You only have to look at the color-coded state health maps comparing COVID-19 cases between the first part of July and the first part of August to see how much the Delta variant has overwhelmed not just Pierce County but Washington state as a whole.
Pierce County is now into 500-plus cases per 100,000 territory.
Among the two counties with the highest rate: Benton County this week was at 1,054 cases per 100,000; Franklin County was at 1,147.2 per 100,000, according to the state’s Roadmap to Recovery dashboard.
With the highly contagious Delta variant rapidly pushing numbers up, Aug. 18 state review of cases said that 94.5 percent of COVID-19 cases statewide who were hospitalized from Feb. 1, 2021 – Aug. 3, 2021 were not fully vaccinated.
In Pierce County, 96 percent of all cases between February and July involved those not fully vaccinated.
Dr. Nathan Schlicher is emergency department physician with St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma and current president of the Washington State Medical Association. Schilcher told The News Tribune on Friday that essentially at his hospital, “It is the winter again.”
“The major two differences are, we’re having more challenges with staffing because the whole nation as we can see is struggling with this variant. And so staffing is incredibly tight, and secondarily, spiritually, it’s challenging .... because at the end of the day, this feels like a preventable wave,” Schlicher said.
Cassie Sauer, Washington State Hospital Association CEO, essentially pleaded with the state’s residents in a Thursday news briefing not to do anything risky that could land them in the hospital.
“The current situation is very grave,” she said. “If you need hospital care, get hospital care. We do not want you to have a stroke and die at home, for sure. But do things that keep you from needing hospital care, really important things — vaccination top of the list.”
Schlicher noted that it’s “hard to have to ask somebody who’s gotten vaccinated and ... needs their heart surgery, you name the disease, to hold on just a minute because we don’t have space. Today we need to schedule your surgery tomorrow.”
Virginia Mason Franciscan Health reported 150 COVID-19 patients across its system the week of Aug. 16, with 16 COVID-positive patients on ventilators systemwide.
“Like other hospitals, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health is receiving transfer requests from across the state, and occasionally bordering states,” the health system told The News Tribune in response to questions via email.
At Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma, media representative Kalyn Kinomoto told The News Tribune in response to questions via email that the hospital was currently treating two children for COVID-19, “one of whom is in PICU.”
While the child hospitalization rate there was low, she noted that positive test rates were higher, with 82 kids testing positive through its emergency department in August, up from 10 in June and 30 in July.
The age range of cases the hospital sees is 0-18, but “a majority of cases this month are in the 0-2 years old bracket, with two in the 18 years or older bracket,” Kinomoto wrote.
A similar story was unfolding at St. Joseph, along with more sick young adults.
“We’re seeing more children, but we’re also seeing more young adults, 20- and 30-year old people that are incredibly sick,” Schlicher said. “I saw a young man on one of my last shifts, a 30-year-old healthy guy, and his oxygen level was in the 70s.”
Blood oxygen levels are normally in the 95-100 percent range.
“By the time I was admitting him to the COVID unit he was on BiPAP where we’re breathing for you with a mask, and one step away from being on a ventilator,” Schlicher said.
He added: “Now, when this disease is taking out healthy 30-year olds, I think that should make us all recognize the severity of the disease, and if you’re not vaccinated already, get out there and get it done.”
Holly Harvey, media representative for MultiCare, told The News Tribune via email that the health system as of Thursday had 171 COVID patients in its Puget Sound hospitals.
The numbers of those hospitalized reported by both MultiCare and VMFH are higher than in November, when the two systems last sounded the alarm on rising case numbers.
Getting tested has become an issue, with several people telling The News Tribune they’d had trouble finding timely appointments or test kits sold in-store with the usual retail pharmacy sites.
Dr. Anthony Chen, director of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, spoke to reporters Wednesday shortly after issuing a countywide mask directive.
“In the course of a week, our demand for test kits has tripled. We know that people coming to our testing information page has gone from 1,800 page views to 12,000 page views,” Chen said Wednesday.
The county mask directive was soon followed with the news from Gov. Jay Inslee of the return of the state’s mask order, making it a requirement for all regardless of vaccination status to mask indoors in public spaces.
SURGE IS EXCEEDING DECEMBER WAVE
The state, in its COVID situation report released Aug. 18, noted, “Overall COVID-related hospital occupancy is increasing sharply through August 15, exceeding peak occupancy last winter.”
Deputy operations chief of COVID-19 response, Kejuan Woods, told Board of Health members this week that Pierce County is seeing some of the highest case rates since December.
“Hospitals are full,” he noted.
Multiple factors are complicating the latest hospital surge: not enough beds/staff at long-term care sites to take patients who need to be discharged, hospital staff shortages amid heightened demand for traveling nurses nationwide, unvaccinated patients now swarming emergency departments, along with non-COVID emergency cases.
Outbreaks are taking hold again, also affecting some area hospitals.
Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, which includes St. Clare, said in a statement on its website, “As of August 17, five patients at St. Clare Hospital tested positive for COVID-19. All patients who tested positive while in the hospital were located on the second floor. Through surveillance testing, we identified seven related employee cases and no additional patient cases.”
The health system said it was taking steps to control the outbreak, including COVID-19 testing for all hospital employees, full personal protective equipment requirements for all patient care on the second floor, and temporarily closing the second floor to new admissions.
Another of VMFH’s sites, St. Michael Medical Center in Kitsap County, also was facing a COVID outbreak, the system noted on its website.
“As of August 19, six employees at St. Michael Medical Center within the Emergency Services department have tested positive for COVID-19,” the health system reported. “These employees worked between August 1 and August 12.”
In both cases, vaccination status was not disclosed of those infected.
VMFH announced on Aug. 6 that workers would be required to be vaccinated, with limited exemptions; MultiCare and Kaiser Permanente have announced similar requirements for workers; a state vaccine mandate for health care workers has set a deadline of Oct. 18.
Dr. George Diaz of Providence Regional Medical Center Everett noted in Thursday’s WSHA call that people who protested mandated vaccines outside his hospital on Wednesday added another layer of stress to health care workers.
“Our staff is frankly frustrated about what’s going on now. They can look out the window and see that the people protesting against vaccines outside can’t see what’s happening inside the building, which is very sick people on oxygen in the ICU,” he said.
Schlicher told The News Tribune he’s not seeing many hardcore anti-vaxxers.
“Most of the people I see with COVID are not the ones you see on the news media, anti-vaxxers screaming at other human beings at school board meetings, that’s not the average person who hasn’t gotten vaccinated that has COVID,” he said.
The unvaccinated he’s seen, for the most part, are “people that are working, hard working maybe multiple jobs, that haven’t had the time or haven’t perceived themselves to have the time because they didn’t think it would affect their life. They were young. They were healthy. They were busy, all those types of things going on. They had been careful.”
He said some have told him, “I don’t go anywhere. I just see my family.”
“Well, your family goes somewhere and you know that’s the hard thing is that they didn’t perceive the risks of themselves,” he said.
He added that once he talks to the family of the patient, “More often than not the family’s, like, ‘I get it now, and I want to get vaccinated.’”
