About 24% of US hospitals are reporting a "critical staffing shortage," according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, as public health experts warn the Covid-19 surge fueled by the Omicron variant threatens the nation's health care system.
"Given how much infection there is, our hospitals really are at the brink right now," Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University's School of Public Health, told CNN on Sunday.
Of the approximately 5,000 hospitals that reported this data to HHS on Saturday, nearly 1,200 -- about 1 in 4 -- said they are currently experiencing a critical staffing shortage, the largest share of the entire pandemic. More than 100 other hospitals said they anticipate a shortage within the next week.
The US health care system is Jha's greatest concern, he said, noting the Omicron surge could hamper its capacity to care for patients suffering from conditions other than Covid-19.
"The health care system is not just designed to take care of people with Covid ... it's designed to take care of kids with appendicitis and people who have heart attacks and get into car accidents," he said.
"And all of that is going to be much, much more difficult because we have a large proportion of the population that is not vaccinated, plenty of high risk people who are not boosted," he said. "That combination sets up a large pool of people who as they get infected will end up really straining the resources we have in the hospitals today."
These staff shortages are growing as frontline health care workers are either infected or forced to quarantine due to exposure to Covid-19 just as the demand for treatment skyrockets: More than 138,000 Covid-19 patients were in US hospitals as of Saturday, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. That's not far from the all-time peak (about 142,200 in mid-January 2021) and an increase from around 45,000 in early November.
To safeguard hospital capacity, some facilities are forced to cut elective surgeries. In New York, for example, 40 hospitals -- mainly in the Mohawk Valley, Finger Lakes and central regions -- have been told to stop nonessential elective operations for at least two weeks because of low patient bed capacity, the state health department said Saturday.
The University of Kansas Health System is also close to implementing crisis standards of care, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Steven Stites said Saturday, telling CNN, "At some point ... we're too overwhelmed to do any of our normal daily work."
"At that point we have to turn on a switch that says we got to triage the people we can help the most," he said, "and that means we've have to let some people die who we might have been able to help but we weren't sure about -- they were too far gone or had too much of an injury, or maybe we can't get to that trauma that just came in."
Stites said two waves were hitting Kansas simultaneously -- with Delta accelerating post-Thanksgiving, to be met by Omicron -- describing it as "almost a double pandemic." The vast majority of those being hospitalized are unvaccinated, Stites said.
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, told CNN on Saturday the next several weeks will "look bad in many American cities."
"Forty hospitals in New York just canceled elective procedures. The DC Hospital Association, where I work, has asked the DC government for permission for hospitals to enact crisis standards of care," he said. "And that's coming to every city in the United States."
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