Norfolk, April 2 (BUS): Hospital numbers for COVID-19 are at their lowest since the early days of the pandemic, providing a much-needed respite for health care workers and patients alike after the Omicron surge, according to the Associated Press (AP) ) mentioned.
The number of patients hospitalized with the coronavirus has fallen by more than 90% in more than two months, and some hospitals are going days without a single COVID-19 patient in an ICU for the first time since early 2020.
The released beds are expected to help US hospitals retain exhausted staff, treat non-COVID-19 patients faster and reduce bloated costs. More family members can visit their loved ones. Doctors hope to see a correction in the decline in pediatric visits, annual checkups and cancer screenings.
“We should all be smiling because the number of people sitting in hospital now with COVID, and people in intensive care units with COVID, are at this low point,” said Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida.
But he said the nation “has paid a heavy price to get to this point….many people got sick and many died.”
Hospitalizations are now at their lowest level since the summer of 2020, when comprehensive national data became available for the first time. The average number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 last week fell nationwide to 11,860, the lowest since 2020 and a sharp regression from the peak of more than 145,000 in mid-January. The previous low was 12041 last June, before the delta variant took hold.
The optimistic trend is also evident in the numbers of intensive care unit patients, which have fallen below 2,000, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“We’re starting to be able to breathe,” said Dr. Jeffrey Weinstein, patient safety officer at Kettering Hospital Health System in western Ohio.
Weinstein said COVID-19 patients filled 30% of Kettering Health’s nearly 1,600 hospital beds in January. The eight hospitals in Kettering are now averaging 2 to 3 COVID-19 admissions per day – sometimes zero.
And while Salmi agreed that it was time for a battered healthcare system to take a breather, he cautioned that the public health community needs to keep an eye on the BA.2 variant of omicron. It is driving increases in hospital admissions in Britain, and is now estimated to account for more than half of infections in the United States.
“It is likely that we are not discovering real infections more now than at any other time during the pandemic,” Salemi said.
For now at least, many hospitals report numbers are down.
In California on Thursday, UC Davis Health tweeted that its intensive care unit had had no COVID-19 patients for two consecutive days for the first time in two years.
“The first patient with COVID-19 arrived in our intensive care unit in February 2020, and the unit has treated at least one positive individual every day since, for at least 761 consecutive days,” the hospital system said.
Toby Marsh, chief nursing officer and patient care services, said in a statement that they hope the numbers are “indicative of sustainable change.”
Dr. Tony Reed, chief medical officer, said patients in Philadelphia are spending less time in the Temple University health system because there is no longer a backlog of MRIs, CT scans, and lab tests.
Reed said the three Temple Health hospitals had six adult COVID-19 patients on Thursday, likely the lowest number of patients since March 2020.
During an omicron wave, patients waited up to 22 hours for a routine MRI, which is usually performed within 12 hours. Long waiting times affected those who came in with difficulty walking – and a lot of pain – for example, due to a herniated disc pressing on the sciatic nerve.
“No one wants to stay in the hospital a day longer than they should,” Reed said.
Emptying beds is also helping patients in rural areas, said Jay Anderson, chief of operations at Ohio’s Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. During sudden booms, the hospital has faced challenges in admitting people from community hospitals who need high-end care for brain tumors, advanced cancer and stroke. This burden is now lifted.
Visitors will also be returning in greater numbers, starting on Tuesday. Ohio no longer limits patients to two specific guests, who can only stop separately.
“Patients recover better when they can reach their families and loved ones,” Anderson said.
Doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists are also getting a much-needed break in some areas.
In Colorado, Dr. Michelle Barron said consistently low hospitalizations for COVID-19 prompted smiles among staff, even as she checked the numbers to make sure they were actually correct.
“I’ve had one of these moments like, this is amazing,” said Barron, M.D., medical director of infection prevention and control at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital. “It feels unreal.”
UCHealth has relaxed some restrictions, including dropping testing requirements for anyone who has entered a facility. And while that has raised some concern among employees, Barron says the numbers haven’t gone up.
“I think some people are starting to take time off and not feel guilty,” she said. “I’ve been spending spring break with my kids and it was a level of happiness where I went, oh my gosh, that’s actually normal.”
Dr. Mike Hooper, chief medical officer at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in southeastern Virginia, said the Omicron increase has strained staff at work — but also at home.
“It was stressful to be in the store…to visit your family,” Huber said. “We all hope that some ‘return to normal’ will help people deal with the stresses inherent in being part of a healthcare team.”
Just because hospital admissions are down doesn’t mean hospitals are empty, said Dr. Frank Johnson, chief medical officer of St. Luke’s Health System in Idaho.
Some measures – such as wearing masks in certain places – will remain in place.
“I don’t know when we will go back to the old practices of mask-wearing in our clinical areas,” Johnson said. “We’ve seen some benefits from that in terms of reducing the number of other viral infections.”
In the meantime, the public health community is keeping an eye on the omicron sub-component BA.2.
Salmi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, said the increase in home testing meant that no more results were included in the official coronavirus case count. Therefore, sewage monitoring would be the early warning signal to watch, he said.
He said “BA.2 here”. “We don’t have to look that far in the rearview mirror to know that things can change very quickly. We saw what happened with Delta. We saw what happened with the omicron… We don’t want to wait until we see a lot of people getting into the hospital before we take action.”
AOQ