These must all be crisis actors. Or the media is fear-mongering. Or Libs are pushing for Communism. Can't possibly be happening, based on what we've been reading on the board.
Inside a Rhode Island hospital E.R. overwhelmed by omicron
WARWICK, R.I. — Mary Balcerzak’s nightmare was coming to an end. The coronavirus-positive woman spent 10 hours sitting with other infected patients in a small emergency department meeting room before health-care workers were able to find a bed for her in tiny Room 25. Now, 36 hours after she arrived, Balcerzak, 70, was about to move upstairs where she belonged, to a bed on a floor inside Kent Hospital.
In a nearby hallway, five people sat in chairs, one man drinking tea, quietly talking to himself. Two elderly women lay on gurneys in another corridor. The patient in Room 28 needed to be moved to intensive care, but there was no bed available.
This is what a slow day looks like in a hospital emergency department overwhelmed by the
coronavirus. On other days, health-care workers have drawn blood from patients as they sat in their cars, set up intravenous drips in the packed waiting room or shunted patients to the overflow tent outside. There was simply no other choice, no other space — and far too few staff.
“Either I take care of someone in a car or I don’t get to take care of them at all. Either I take care of them in the waiting room, or they don’t get care at all,” said Laura Forman, director of Kent Hospital’s emergency department.
“Or they wait 10 hours for care. We have people wait 10 hours or 12 hours to be seen. And if you’re here for an emergency, that’s not tenable.”
The pandemic’s fifth surge is putting emergency departments under enormous stress. In March 2020, as the crisis began, doctors worried whether
intensive care units would be able to handle the deluge of critically ill patients, whether they could scrounge up enough ventilators for all the people who would need them.
This time around, with a
less deadly but
vastly more contagious variant, the greatest damage is at the hospital system’s front door, where emergency rooms that turn away no one are trying to cope with an unprecedented tide of patients and too few staff to treat them.
“We are struggling, and at times failing, to take care of people who come through the door,” Forman said, “because of lack of staffing, because of lack of space, because of lack of resources.”
She urged people to do all they can to avoid seeking emergency care.
“Now is not the time to take up a new sport. Do not go skiing. Shovel your back stairs and salt the living daylights out them,” she said. “Now is not the time to break an ankle. … Take your medications. Do all of the preventive things that you can do to possibly keep yourself out of the hospital right now.”
On Thursday, when The Washington Post spent an afternoon in Kent’s overburdened emergency department, this tiny state of 1.1 million people recorded 5,171 new coronavirus infections, or 488 per every 100,000 residents — the highest rate in the country, according to the seven-day average of data tracked by The Post. Nationally, there were 794,202 new cases.
At nearly 78 percent fully vaccinated, Rhode Island is much better than average. Forman has not seen a single vaccinated person die in the current surge.
Many experts believe the reported infection rate does not reflect the true extent of the omicron variant’s spread, because people who prove to be positive on
at-home tests do not always report the results to public health authorities, and because a larger number of infected people
appear to be asymptomatic during the omicron wave.
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