Yesterday we talked about COVID-19 deaths. Now, let’s talk about hospitalizations.
Rumor has it that J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital’s intensive care units are filled to max capacity with COVID-19 patients. Like most rumors, there’s a kernel of truth to the claim, but overall the statement is misleading.
As of Monday, Ruby’s 86 ICU beds were full. Of those 86 beds, however, only 17 were occupied by people with COVID. There were an additional 53 patients with the coronavirus in the hospital but not in an ICU.
In response the Ruby rumor, Dr. Clay Marsh tweeted: “While we are seeing more covid [sic] positive patients hospitalized, the ICU capacity in WV is still available …” Which is reassuring on the surface, but “ICU capacity in WV is still available” is not the same as ICU capacity still being available in areas experiencing massive spikes.
Remember this spring and summer when the national chant was “flatten the curve”? The whole idea was to force the spread of the coronavirus to slow enough that hospitals and ICUs wouldn’t be overwhelmed with COVID patients. And we managed to flatten the curve — briefly. But as soon as we saw success, we started lifting restrictions and ignoring the ones that remained. And now we are seeing a surge that could threaten to overwhelm our intensive care units.
Allow us to clarify: Yes, the majority of ICU beds are not occupied by COVID patients. Most of the ICU capacity is from heart patients and individuals who have been in accidents. But car wrecks, heart attacks, strokes, brain injuries, etc., don’t stop just because there is a pandemic. Which means that every ICU bed in use by a COVID patient is one bed less for someone suffering from a major medical emergency.
There is not one single action that we can collectively point to and say, “This prevents an accident/stroke/heart attack/etc.” which means there isn’t one proven thing we can all do to prevent the injuries or conditions that would normally land someone in the ICU. But we can point to wearing a mask and say, “This one thing has been shown to minimize the spread of coronavirus.”
It’s like we’re pouring water into an almost full bathtub faster than the water can drain. If we don’t lessen the water pressure — a trickle instead of waterfall — we can overflow the tub. Without masks and other precautions, COVID cases are a waterfall gushing into hospitals, threatening to overwhelm them; there will be more people going in than coming out. With masks and hand-washing and social distancing and other precautions, we can turn the flow of coronavirus cases requiring hospitalization into a trickle, which will be much easier for our existing medical infrastructure to handle.
We flattened the curve once; we can do it again.
