WA state hospitals ‘remarkably strained’ by COVID-19 community spread, officials say
Story has been updated with corrected daily death count. An earlier version contained an incorrect number from WSHA.
Washington hospital officials warned Monday that facilities are heading toward the bad old days of COVID-19 cases peaking and high spread in the community.
This go-around, while patients are not as sick as they’ve been in previous surges, the caseload is impacting not just those seeking COVID care but, as in previous waves, those seeking treatments for other health emergencies.
“I’m sorry to say that we are back here today to talk to you about COVID ... because we really would like to not have to talk about COVID,” said Cassie Sauer, Washington State Hospital Association CEO.
“At the end of last week, we reached almost 600 COVID cases in our hospitals across the state,” Sauer noted, with another 75 suspected cases not yet confirmed, with about 20-25 patients a day on ventilators.
That compares with an average of around 230 hospitalized cases in the daily census in April, and 1,700 in February during the Omicron wave.
While the state is seeing six to seven COVID deaths a day now from COVID-19, those who become seriously ill still might not survive or become “severely disabled,” from the disease, Sauer noted.
“It’s still something you don’t want to get,” she said, “and we want to urge you to do everything you can to protect yourself.”
Given the rising hospitalized cases, officials on the media briefing call Monday implored people to return to wearing high-quality masks indoors in crowded, public spaces, and to keep up with COVID booster shots on top of vaccinations.
Community spread is affecting not just patients but health care workers.
“When there’s COVID in the community, there’s COVID among staff members as well,” said Dr. Chris Baliga, infectious disease specialist at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, noting that a COVID infection can take a health care worker out of the workplace for at least 10 days.
“And that is a significant impact to the number of people we have available,” he noted.
Dr. David Carlson is executive vice president Provider Enterprise and chief physician officer for MultiCare.
Carlson said, “The pressures on staffing is enormous. And as we move in and out of COVID surges, what it means is at times to staff our facilities, we’ve got to use staffing levels that are either contingent or crisis staffing .... where sometimes we have to ask people who feel well enough to come to work, which is not ideal, but that’s the situation that we’re put in in many facilities.”
Carlson said his health system was running at about 120 percent of normal capacity, faced not just with COVID cases but “pent-up demand” for care that may have faced earlier pandemic delays.
The state ended its universal mask mandate earlier this year, and the full accounting of how many new cases actually exist is getting harder to pinpoint as more people rely on home tests.
Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department reported more than 1,000 new cases last week but acknowledged it was a likely undercount because of the Memorial Day holiday.
Officials on Monday said if people do test positive, either with a PCR test or home antigen test, they should seek treatment as quickly as possible given the long list of qualifying conditions for COVID therapeutics, such as Paxlovid.
“We are at a point where we have supplies for all of this. They’re available. Feel free to reach out to providers to try to get them,” Baliga said.
Many people, without the mandate and without seeing COVID in headlines every day, might consider a head cold or other respiratory infection as something else, which would be a mistake, the officials warned.
“When you feel sick today, you need to think about COVID,” Carlson said.
“You are contagious for two days prior to developing symptoms, so you can feel fine, then get sick tomorrow night and everyone that you saw for the 48 hours is potentially at risk,” Baliga noted.
Dr. Steven Mitchell with the Washington Medical Coordination Center at Harborview Medical Center said that requests from hospitals for help in easing patients loads with transfers have doubled in recent days.
“Our health care system continues to be remarkably strained,” he said. “Hospitals like Good Samaritan Hospital, Tacoma General and St. Joe’s already are operating at a pretty significantly strained level.”
“Even in normal times, we don’t have a lot of extra capacity,” Sauer noted.
This story was originally published June 6, 2022 at 1:35 PM.
