Editorial: Keeping hospitals from being swamped is a collective responsibility

The great fear with any disease is always death. We worry about how many people it will steal.

But with a pandemic — a rising tide of illness that isn’t confined to one school district, one town or even one country — there is another concern that can be a predictor of that grim toll.

Hospitalizations.

Back in March and April, when the lockdowns for covid-19 were at their peak and so was the fear of this new disease, Gov. Tom Wolf did not just say it was about preventing infection. It was about preventing hospitals from being swamped by caseloads they couldn’t contain.

In New York City, that happened, with patients filling hallways and hospitals running out of space in intensive care units and emergency rooms. The dead were loaded into refrigerated trucks to relieve overwhelmed morgues.

Beyond the surplus of covid sufferers, overwhelmed hospitals become unable to give proper treatment to other patients. Victims of car accidents or heart attacks could die without rapid emergency care. Less urgent but also worrying are patients seeking “elective procedures,” from cancer treatment to orthopedic surgery, which could become deadly or debilitating if delayed.

We were warned the disease could strike back harder in the fall. It has. Pennsylvania numbers are higher than they ever have been.

Over the weekend, regional health care systems reported a 500% increase in hospitalizations over the spring. According to state numbers, there were 2,904 hospitalized covid patients across Pennsylvania on Saturday. There were 921 in UPMC facilities alone Sunday.

This is consistent with the kind of increase shown by testing. It is not, as some say, simply a matter more tests resulting in more positive responses. It is that while three or four results were positive out of every 100 tests a few months ago, today that number is exponentially higher. Allegheny County’s positivity rate was 28.87% on Tuesday. In Westmoreland County, it was 38.26%.

More cases of the disease doesn’t automatically mean the coronavirus is taking a more savage bite. What it does mean is there are more opportunities for the slim slice of severe cases to become the slimmer slice of hospitalized ones.

And it means it is even more important to take the risks seriously and to not make the situation a political showdown when being careful doesn’t have to be a fight.

Has the state made mistakes? Has the governor been inconsistent? Has the information been confusing and sometimes contradictory? Yes.

But that doesn’t change the fact everyone has it in their own socially distanced power to take steps to minimize their contact. And if we all slow the spread, the spread slows.

The greatest fear is the hospitalization and what could come next. We don’t have to live in fear. But we can live with responsibility.