'It's critical.' COVID-19 is filling Wake hospitals and emergency departments
Aug. 25—RALEIGH — The explosion of coronavirus cases in recent weeks has helped fill hospitals in
The situation has grown critical, according to top doctors at
In particular, they said with hospital beds full, patients are getting backed up in emergency departments that are crowded with people seeking care for COVID-19 and other ailments. The lobbies at the emergency department at
"Our wait times are higher than they've ever been at Duke Raleigh. I'm sure other hospitals can agree to that as well," Plonk said. "And it's creating a great deal of stress and frustration. I think a lot of people are waiting in our lobby and other lobbies in our country longer than they ever thought they would have to wait for health care in this country."
Plonk and the other doctors urged people to consider alternatives to the emergency room, such as primary care physicians, urgent care centers or minute clinics. They said emergency departments prioritize the most critically sick or injured patients, and those with more routine problems are likely to wait many hours.
"When you're seeking care, and we know you will, if you can avoid the emergency department, it's a good thing to do that," said Dr.
The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in
But hospitals say that unlike last winter, the summer surge in COVID-19 came at a time when they were already busy with patients with other ailments and injuries, including chronic problems such as diabetes and heart disease that had gone untreated during the worst of the pandemic.
"It's the effects of an 18-month pandemic that we're seeing," Plonk said. "It's folks that have chronic conditions who haven't been able to care for themselves as well as they might have otherwise. We're seeing folks who've lost their job, who've lost their insurance, who've had changes in their family situation, who maybe have lost folks in their family who might have been primary caregivers or had changes to their primary care. All of these things have created gaps in people's resources that would otherwise keep them healthy."
As a result, Brody said,
"As the hospital's full and you have long lengths of stay and you can't discharge folks, that backs up the whole pipeline," Brody said. "So it's hard to get people admitted. Even to get people seen and treated and released is hard. So those wait times are long."
Rex hospital exceeds capacity
Someone coming to the emergency department at UNC Rex hospital may wait as long as a full day to be seen, said
"There are several days during the week when our largest inpatient unit is actually our emergency department," Butler said.
She said the situation has gotten to the point that emergency medical services crews have had to wait for up to two hours for a space to open up for a patient.
"EMS has never had to wait in our ED before," she said. "That just speaks to the volume challenges that we have."
As with hospital emergency rooms, Wake County EMS is seeing unprecedented demand for its services, said Dr. Jose Cabañas, the chief medical officer. Some increase in demand is expected as the population grows, Cabañas said, but this summer's spike has been unusual.
Cabañas said Wake EMS is answering 355 calls a day on average this summer and some days more than 400, compared to an average of 330 a day before the pandemic. The agency had never answered more than 10,000 calls in a month until recently and is on pace to top 11,000 in August, he said.
"We triage calls to make sure that life-threatening emergency conditions are getting the resources rapidly when they need it," he said. "If you need us, we will be there, but the system is stressed."
The doctors at Wednesday's press conference also kept coming back to the need for people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. They said the surge in COVID-19 patients remains largely among the unvaccinated, who account for more than 90% of patients hospitalized with the disease.
As of Wednesday, 57% of
"Please get vaccinated so you do not end up a patient in one of our hospitals," Butler said. "We don't want your business; we want you to be healthy."
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