San Diego –
As the number of coronavirus-related hospitalizations continues to rise in San Diego and across the country, the havoc is beginning to be seen among the women and men caring for people whose infections are life-threatening.
According to the county health department’s latest weekly tracking report, total COVID-19-related hospitalizations hit 407 on Tuesday, a week after the number hit 316.
Most of the patients have not been vaccinated.
Although the figure is still far from the peak of more than 1,800 recorded in January, experts say that the current upward trend, which is also leading to increased volume in emergency services, is beginning to call into question the ability to organizations to recruit enough staff.
Dr. Ghazala Sharieff, Scripps Health’s chief medical officer, said Wednesday that there are several reasons why COVID-19 is causing a personnel problem.
“For the staff, it’s a little bit of everything,” Sharieff said. “People are tired, people planned a well-deserved summer vacation, people are reporting sick.”
In general, medical service providers can rely on companies specialized in hiring personnel to fill the gaps, but that resource has also been less available.
“The agencies that we have spoken with have told us that they have had staff who have decided not to want to work anymore because they have just been through COVID, and they are exhausted,” Sharieff said. “Even if you go to an agency, it’s hard to get people to come to work.”
Many, added Cassia Yi, UC San Diego Health program coordinator and nurse specialist, are choosing to retire rather than fight another wave. Or, they are simply avoiding working on some units.
“Now when we interview the traveling nurses, one of the first questions they ask is, ‘Is it a COVID unit?’” Yi says. “And if we say yes, they say: ‘I’m not interested.’
And the number of new infections arriving daily shows no signs of abating.
The total of new cases on Tuesday was 908, after Monday’s count of 1204, the highest daily figure on record since July 22. The daily number of new cases has exceeded 700 every day except one in the last two weeks.
There was some good news in Wednesday’s update. The number of San Diego County residents who are fully vaccinated finally surpassed 2 million after weeks stalled at 1.9 million. The total number of residents with at least one dose is nearly 2.3 million of the 2.8 million residents 12 and older who are eligible to be vaccinated.
Last year, public health departments forced hospitals to cancel scheduled medical procedures – from knee replacement to cancer operations – to make room for COVID patients. So far, that doesn’t appear to be happening in local hospitals yet.
Sharieff said the public needs to understand that preventing the virus from crowding out other necessary medical care comes down once again to wearing face masks. The latest research indicates that even vaccinated people can become re-infected – so-called cases of rupture– and transmit the virus to the unvaccinated. Although the medical problems are usually much milder in the case of fully vaccinated, the ability to continue to spread the pandemic is truly dangerous.
“What we are seeing now has been incubating for 2 to 14 days, so we are going to have what we are going to have,” he said. “Starting today, let’s not continue with this wave that does not stop.”
And COVID-19 is already putting heavy pressure on the more specialized parts of the healthcare system. Yi, who coordinates UCSD’s mobile extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, program, said the number of requests for the service has skyrocketed to the point where local programs are now forced to be more selective than in the recent past. .
“Three to four weeks ago, I was getting about one ECMO referral a week, and now I’m probably getting two to eight a day,” he said. “These are doctors calling from all over Southern California for help who have reached their capacity.”
ECMO is a service that is only used when a patient’s lungs become so swollen that their blood must be oxygenated by a machine outside their body.
In recent weeks, said Dr. Mazen Odish, a UCSD pulmonologist who works with Yi, patients arriving at the unit are much younger than they were last year. Of the six COVID-19 patients currently on ECMO at UCSD, none are vaccinated.
Seeing so many who are so young with young families, he said, is heartbreaking when it’s so obvious that getting vaccinated would have helped immensely.
“Many of these patients have chosen not to get vaccinated and, unfortunately, many of them are suffering in the same way that many of the patients last year had to go through,” he said.
“We are seeing their vaccinated relatives come to visit them and feel an extraordinary amount of pain for their sick loved one, but also anger that they were not vaccinated and are now in this state,” Yi added.
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