US hospitals are setting up circus-like triage tents, calling doctors out of retirement, guarding their supplies of masks and making plans to cancel elective surgery as they brace for an expected onslaught of COVID-19 patients.
Depending on how bad the crisis gets, the sick could find themselves waiting on stretchers in emergency room hallways for hospital beds to open up, or could be required to share rooms with others infected.
Some doctors fear hospitals could become so overwhelmed that they could be forced to ration medical care.
Photo: AP
“This is going to be a fairly tremendous strain on our health system,” said William Jaquis, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
The US is still facing an active flu season and many hospitals are already running at capacity caring for those patients.
The novel coronavirus would only add to that burden, said Bruce Ribner, an infectious-disease specialist at Emory University’s medical school.
Health authorities are taking emergency steps to waive certain laws and regulations to help hospitals deal with the crisis.
Hospitals, too, are getting ready. To keep suspected coronavirus patients from mingling with others in the emergency room, the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, Maine, set up a tent in the parking lot where people with respiratory symptoms are diverted for testing.
Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, South Carolina, did the same outside its emergency room.
In Seattle, hit by the nation’s biggest cluster of coronavirus deaths, most of them at a suburban nursing home, UW Medicine set up drive-thru testing in a hospital parking garage and has screened hundreds of staff members, faculty and trainees, with nurses reaching through car windows and using swabs to collect specimens from people’s nostrils.
Drive-thru testing is expected to be offered to patients as soon as tomorrow.
At Spectrum Health Gerber Memorial Hospital in Fremont, Michigan, Robert Davidson, an emergency medicine doctor, said hip and knee replacement surgery and other operations that are not emergencies might be postponed.
Authorities in New York state and Illinois are talking about doing the same.
If an outbreak hits, “things that don’t need to be done right now won’t be done right now,” said Raj Govindaiah, chief medical officer for Memorial Health System.
Govindaiah said the hospitals are also hiding the freebie surgical masks usually offered to visitors in the lobby, so that doctors and nurses can use them instead if supplies run tight.
At Blue Ridge Regional Hospital in the small mountain community of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, respirator masks are locked and under video surveillance.
In New York state, which has a large outbreak, the state Health Department is accelerating regulations to get nursing students certified to work more quickly and is asking retired doctors and nurses to offer their services, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said.
How bad US hospitals would be hit is unclear, in part because mistakes on the part of the government in ramping up widespread testing for the virus have left public health officials uncertain as to how many people are infected.
The number of cases in the US was put at about 1,700 on Friday, with about 50 deaths. However, by some estimates, at least 14,000 people might be infected.
Experts fear that when the problems with testing are resolved, a flood of patients will hit the nation’s emergency rooms.
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