Someone close to me, who works at a hospital, in San Diego, says the patient census is lower now than it has been in many years. All elective procedures are canceled in anticipation of being flooded with virus patients. But the flood hasn’t happened.
You are right, my wife is a nurse, so I have lots of first hand information, hospitals in most parts of the country are way below normal use since everything elective is canceled. The ones in my area sent nurses home on lockdown, or have them working 2 days a week.
My wife had a possible exposure which turned out to be negative, so she was off for 2 weeks just in case. When she went back to work yesterday, they are going to approximately half schedule. There are no patients, she works for a general practitioner, had 3 patients where a normal day is 25-30. Any news article (especially from the usual suspects) that say they are overwhelmed is to put it bluntly....full of crap. Not the word I intended to say, but I am feeling nice today.
In our area of “south bay” Los Angeles county, it’s the same. Elective procedures postponed, hospitals relatively empty, just waiting for the surge.
Same problem with Sarasota Memorial hospital. They canceled all elective surgeries. 836 beds, 34 COVID19 patients, five have died. Hospital is losing $16 million and is now furloughing staff.
Same here is Upstate NY. Hospitals are practically empty.
Something that I don’t think people who “aren’t in the business” don’t realize. These patients who are presenting for care are ALL critically ill. In a normal day even a big hospital only has a handful of these cases and the resources a case like that suck up are immense. In not only supplies but emotional drain on the staff. A “bad outcome” here and there does send an emotional shockwave through the staff on a good day. They understand it, it comes with the territory but it does take a toll.
What they are experiencing in NYC right now I suspect, is for each team member admitting these folks they are seeing something that usually happens once every few day happenings every hour. Watching that many people die hour after hour is not their “normal day” by any stretch of the imagination if they were all MIs. Imagine all that while wearing PPE.
When I was young there was a book. “The House of God”. The First Rule of The House of God is, “The patient is the one with the disease.” You really have to remember that to maintain emotional distance. These people are having to do this in an environment where suddenly YOU could be the one on the stretcher. It must be a serious emotional challenge to function in that environment. One the #s fail to inform.
We also have a very low census and have seen no increase in suspected and confirmed cases over the past 15 days in our north metro Atlanta hospital. Every day consists of endless Zoom meetings to plan for a surge that to date has not happened.
I consider this to be a good thing as our resources are not being depleted and our community is not suffering greatly like some other parts of this nation.