Posted on 10/22/2020 8:16:35 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – St. Louis County leaders said the latest COVID data is concerning.
St. Louis Metro Pandemic Task Force leader Dr. Alex Garza said they are seeing a high number of occupied hospital beds with about 90 percent of healthcare beds full in the SSM Health system. The numbers were slightly lower in metro hospitals at 85 percent.
“Speaking with our task force hospitals yesterday that same sort of level was echoed across all the hospitals from St. Luke’s to Mercy to BJC,” Dr. Garza said. “We normally don’t operate at that high of a level.”
However, Dr. Garza said it is not only the lack of room that is stressful, but it is also the concern that there are not enough healthcare workers to staff those hospital beds because more frontline workers are catching the virus.
(Excerpt) Read more at fox2now.com ...
I hear NY retirement homes have some empty beds. Surely andy won’t mind.
St. Louis area hospitals at 85-90% capacity...
“Build it and they will come.”
DEAL with it. Life has to go on.
Mortality from the Chinese virus continues to go way down.
St. Louis area hospitals at 85-90% capacity “of the hospital rooms set aside for Covid 19” due to pandemic.
There, fixed it.
What was capacity utilization in October 2019? What is normal capacity utilization?
Okay....once again for those of you in Rio Linda:
Hospitals scale their available beds to demand for purely economic reasons. It makes no economic sense for them to keep 25 ICU units up and running if they almost never use more than ten.
Most of them are prepared to ramp-up quickly if a situation arises. 85% capacity today could easily be 40% tomorrow after a few phone calls.
My daughter is an ICU nurse so I’ve been educated about this a bit.
Hospitals are in many ways like hotels and the hotel industry has studied the effect of occupancy on profitability pretty thoroughly. It turns out that for medium price range hotels, 75% occupancy is the most profitable rate whereas for high-end hotels, 85% occupancy is peak profitability. Many hospital executives talk about 85% being the ideal occupancy rate for a hospital and I have to admit, that is sort of the number I have in mind when I look at our morning census. But is 85% really ideal? I would argue… no.
If the occupancy is too low, then you have too many staff sitting around without work to do and you will lose money. If the occupancy is too high, then a couple of nurse call-offs means excessive work for the other nurses and can hurt morale. Furthermore, if you are completely full, you have to turn away patients and in the long-run that can harm both reputation and future referrals. So, on the surface, the 85% number seems like a good compromise with enough capacity to manage an unexpected surge in admissions but no so low that you are sending nurses home.
The average occupancy across the USA in 2017 (a non pandemic year) was 65.9%. It would stand to reason that therefore some hospitals were at the 80-90% rate sometime in the year. Of course, the media doesn’t want this known, since panic is their lifeline.
blah blah blah...same fear mongering we heard in April....always on the edge of armageddeon....
I suspect everyone over 50 who caught the flu probably ran to the hospital in a panic.
All they have to do is ASK for federal help.
I would think most hospitals with an 85-90% capacity would see that as a God send, especially if they had been experiencing lower numbers in the past. You have to keep the beds filled if they are to operate at a profit.
I have heard stories about doctor owned hospitals that intentionally admitted folks that would have been sent home had the beds been filled already. They like to keep the beds filled. All of them.
The only thing concerning to me with 90% of the beds having someone in it, is that the person in it actually needed to be in it, and that they’re not just put there to scam the insurance companies.
That occupancy rate should make the administrator very pleased.
the numbers are meaningless....
this if fall....this is the time elderly get sick, homeless come wandering in, etc....
When I drive by a hospital, I see it the same as when I drive by a “drive up” cigarette store or topless bar. I have little to no need for one. Frankly, I don’t need a mortuary either. My wife and I will be buried on our property. If she dies before me, only family, friends and Social Security will even know about it.
people do get admitted to ICU due to severe illness but also ICU can be an overflow if there are no monitored beds available on the acute care/coronary care unit, and vice a versa...
https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-capacity
Estimated nationwide hospital utilization rates, including for WuFlu.
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Headlines in AZ:
Coronavirus in Arizona is spreading at its fastest rate since June. Here’s what we know
ASU experts say Arizona is now in a COVID-19 surge
Arizona reports 994 new coronavirus cases, 5 more deaths
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Facts in AZ:
Lancet sept 2020
“COVID-19 is not a pandemic. It is a syndemic“
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