‘Shot way up.’ Tri-Cities hospitalized COVID patient numbers reach new high

The number of people hospitalized in Benton and Franklin counties for treatment of COVID-19 hit a new high of 111 patients on Monday.

At the previous peak of COVID-19 cases in the Tri-Cities area this past winter, the highest daily count of patients hospitalized for COVID was 74, as reported by the Benton Franklin Health District.

By the second week of August, that record had been broken.

A little more than half the beds at Trios Southridge, the main hospital in Kennewick, are being used for COVID-19 patients, said John Solheim, Trio Health chief executive, on the Friday Coffee with Karl webcast of the Tri-City Development Council.

“It has really shot way up,” he said.

More patients are being kept in the emergency department until beds are available than ever before, he said.

At times half of the emergency department beds are being used to hold patients waiting for a bed to become available at the hospital so they can be admitted, he said.

About 97% of intensive care unit beds in the state are full, making it difficult to transfer patients, he said.

In the past the hospital was used to emergencies, such as multi-vehicle crashes that bring in several patients at once, but now the high demand for emergency care has been sustained for several weeks, he said.

“As we look toward the fair and as we look toward Labor Day and as we look toward other things, the concern is even more,” he said.

The Benton Franklin Health District has traced cases to multiple large events, including Water Follies, the Whisky Music Fest in Pendleton, the Watershed Festival at the Gorge at George and a large out-of-state wedding, said Dr. Amy Person, health officer for Benton and Franklin counties, on the Coffee with Karl webcast.

But because the delta variant is so contagious, any person who is not vaccinated can be “a superspreader,” she said. Some businesses have had to close temporarily because half or more of their workforce is infected, she said.

Trios is very supportive of getting as many people as possible vaccinated against COVID-19, but is concerned that a Washington state mandate that all health care workers be vaccinated with cause employees to quit while staffing already is tight, Solheim said.

“Even losing one nurse, one environmental service (worker), one maintenance worker for their beliefs is problematic,” he said.

Trios now has 32 nurses who travel the nation taking temporary jobs. They can go to other states where the vaccine is not mandated, he said.

Lourdes Health in Pasco

Dr. Jasdip Matharu, pulmonologist at Lourdes Health in Pasco, says the hospital has stopped many surgeries that would require people to spend at least a night in the hospital, if the surgery can be delayed.

Staff are tired, particularly the intensive care unit, he said.

Each ICU nurse can take care of just two patients at a time, and if a single nurse is off for even a day, that means one less ICU bed available, he said.

Matharu said Lourdes Health is also treating patients with long-term effects from having COVID-19, including recommending people with lungs ravaged by COVID-19 for lung transplants.

Other post-COVID patients have problems such as sleep disorders or being unable to eat because food smells putrid, he said.

Some patients with lung damage from COVID-19 improve but others continue to worsen, he said.

No one has been hospitalized at Lourdes with an adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine, he said.

Kadlec hospital in Richland

At the Kadlec Regional Medical Center about 75 patients were being treated for COVID-19 as of the Wednesday, Aug. 18, Kadlec on Call podcast.

They included 12 patients in the ICU, all but two of them on ventilators, said Dr. Phani Kantamneni, medical director of the Kadlec ICU, on the podcast.

Most patients earlier in the pandemic were 65 and older but Kantamneni says now the majority of his patients are ages 25 to 55.

To see formerly healthy patients so sick they need treatment in the ICU, some of them dying from the disease, is distressing since there is a vaccine that could have kept them safe, he said.

The vaccine works about 95% of the time to keep people from getting sick enough to come to the hospital, he said.

Since January only three or four people who were vaccinated against COVID-19 have been treated at the Kadlec ICU, the largest in the Tri-Cities, and all were released from the ICU, he said.

The Washington state Department of Health reports an increase in the number of patients admitted across the state for COVID-19 treatment has increased for all adult age groups, but notably in younger ages, those 20 to 39.

Low vaccination rates

Unvaccinated people ages 16-44 and 45-64 are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who are fully vaccinated, according to the Washington state Department of Health.

Admissions are about 6 times higher for unvaccinated people ages 65 and up, it said.

The 111 patients being treated for COVID-19 on Monday at the Richland, Kennewick, Pasco and Prosser hospitals accounted for 30% of all 370 patients, according to the Benton Franklin Health District.

The number of hospitalized patients dropped to 102 on Tuesday, accounting for 27% of all patients.

When Dr. Person spoke Friday, 9% of all new cases reported the day before in Washington state were in Benton and Franklin County residents, she said. However, the counties have only 4% of the state’s population.

She says the high case count is due to having industries, such as food processing, where many people work close together and opposition to wearing masks.

But the biggest contributor is the low rate of COVID-19 vaccination in Benton and Franklin counties.

The number of people vaccinated in Benton and Franklin counties goes up a half to 1 percent a week, she said.

At that rate it will take another two and a half months for Benton County to get to 50% vaccinated and three to three and a half months for Franklin County, she estimated.

“That is not fast enough. We need to pick up the pace a little more,” she said.

Tri-Cities COVID cases

The Benton Franklin Health District has reported 726 more cases of COVID-19 in the past five days, for an average per day of 182.

That’s down from an average of 234 new cases per day on average the previous week and 203 the week before that.

However, the two-week rate of new confirmed cases for the two counties combined has reached a new high.

On Tuesday the health district was reporting an average of 972 new cases per 100,000 people over two weeks.

Benton County had a new case rate of 961 new cases per 100,000 people, exceeding the previous peak during the winter of 816.

Franklin County, with a new case rate of 996 cases per 100,000, is still below its winter peak new case rate of 1,209.

The Benton Franklin Health District, which reports COVID-19 deaths once a week, reached 365 deaths due to complications of the disease.

On Tuesday the Grant County Health District reported 12 more county residents had died of the disease to bring that county’s total to 146.

The health district had not publicly update the death total due to COVID-19 since June 29.

It reported that 10 of them had not been vaccinated and that three of them had no underlying health conditions that put them at risk for a severe case of COVID-19. They ranged in age from their 40s to their 90s.

This story was originally published August 24, 2021 at 12:51 PM.