Covid cases create 'desperate' situation at Westmoreland hospitals

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the omicron variant of covid-19 has eclipsed delta in terms of transmissibility, rising caseloads have created a “desperate” situation at local hospitals, according to the medical director of Westmoreland County’s 911 center.

In an email addressed Monday to all county police and fire chiefs, Dr. William A. Jenkins reported that “covid-19 numbers are higher than ever, resulting in excess hospitalizations, especially among unvaccinated residents in our county.”

He said hospitals are functioning at greater than 100% capacity with “a scarcity of inpatient hospital beds and intensive care unit beds. The emergency departments are overcrowded, with admitted patients waiting for inpatient beds to open up as well as an ongoing influx of critically ill patients.

“Emergency department wait times have skyrocketed and many patients are being cared for in hallways due to lack of available acute care bed space. The situation is desperate.”

“The numbers of covid cases are continuing to climb,” said Dr. Carol Fox, chief medical officer for Excela Health, which operates hospitals in Greensburg, Latrobe and Mt. Pleasant.

“The wait times in emergency departments across the region are increasing,” she said. “Patients are being cared for in nontraditional areas. It is important to do all that can be done to prevent individuals from contracting covid-19. This includes wearing masks and, just as importantly, getting vaccinated.”

According to the state Department of Health’s covid-19 dashboard, 13.6% of the 3,539 staffed adult intensive care beds in the state were available on Tuesday.

There were 4,694 covid patients in Pennsylvania hospitals, 963 of them in adult ICU beds and 537 of them on ventilators.

In Westmoreland County, there were 315 new covid cases on Monday, bringing the county’s total cumulative confirmed cases to 35,767 and probable cases to 19,668. There were 1,026 deaths in the county that have been attributed to covid-19.

The omicron variant of covid-19 is spreading rapidly and could become the dominant strain in the United States in the coming weeks, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC director.

The CDC reported Tuesday that the omicron variant accounts for 3% of all sequenced cases of covid-19 across the nation.

Since the summer, the delta variant has accounted for roughly 99% of all U.S. cases. But omicron has “eclipsed” delta in terms of transmissibility, Walensky said.

Jenkins advised the county’s first responders to “protect yourselves, protect your families, make the necessary departmental adjustments to be available to continue to serve the community.”

“We experience backlogs at many regional hospitals on a daily basis,” said Lorenzo Garino, spokesman for Mutual Aid Ambulance Service. “The situation has been worsening probably for the past two months.”

Matt Stromberg, a board member with Murrysville Medic One, has heard similar reports from that ambulance service’s crews concerning area hospitals. “I do hear from our crews that a lot of times nurses are saying there’s a much longer wait than there has been in the past.”

“The hospitals are really being hit hard” with covid patients as well as non-covid patients seeking emergency care, Stromberg said. “They’re doing the best they can to get people the treatment they need.”

“We are working with leadership at Excela to ensure the hospitals can be adequately decompressed, which will allow for more optimum patient care,” Garino said.

He said Mutual Aid ambulances can transfer some patients to other medical facilities or rehab centers, freeing up bed space for incoming patients.

“It’s important for people in our area to understand they can still get the care that they need,” Garino added.

Hospitalization rates and average lengths of hospital stays in countries that have seen large surges of omicron cases have been much lower than in previous waves. But Walensky said more data is needed to understand how omicron will affect the U.S. population.

“If you have twice as many infections and half the amount of severe disease, you still have a lot of severe disease,” she said, “which is why prevention is so key right now.”