Hospitals ‘overwhelmed.’ Doctor urges people to return to wearing COVID masks

Tri-Cities area hospitals and other health care systems are overwhelmed as COVID-19 cases surge, said doctors at a Benton Franklin Health District news media briefing Friday.

Area residents need to act responsibly to get the increase under control, or the area could face mandates, said Dr. Amy Person, health officer for Benton and Franklin counties.

“If we don’t demonstrate as a community we are capable of making these choices and making those decisions to reduce the cases, to reduce the load on our hospitals and health care systems, we may end up losing the freedom to make those choices,” she said.

While increasing the Tri-Cities area low COVID-19 vaccination rate is the longer term solution, it won’t stop the current surge in new cases fast enough, said Dr. Person.

The best hope is for people, even those who are vaccinated, is to resume wearing face masks indoors if they may be around unvaccinated people, she said. Unvaccinated people are legally required to wear masks in public in Washington state.

“Over the last year and a half as we’ve seen case counts and hospitalizations rise, as a community we have always managed to pull back from the brink of overwhelming our hospitals and health care systems — until now,” Dr. Person said.

The stress on hospitals is significantly higher than it was a year ago, said Reza Kaleel, chief executive at Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland, the Tri-Cities’ largest hospital.

Hospitals overwhelmed

“Our system is stressed to the point of being overwhelmed,” and that is not unique to Kadlec, to Tri-Cities hospitals or to the region, said Dr. John Matheson, director of the Kadlec emergency department.

As soon as a bed opens up anywhere in the hospital, there is someone on a waiting list to fill it.

People are being held in the emergency department until a bed is available for them and they can be admitted.

When a patient needs to be transferred to a hospital offering a higher level of care, more than 20 calls may be made to find a place for them and it may be hundreds of miles away, Matheson said.

Kadlec also is receiving many calls from other hospitals looking for beds for patients they need to transfer.

Ambulances are being diverted from Kadlec more often than Kaleel has seen before, because no bed with adequate staffing is available, he said.

Part of the problem is limited staff, as health care workers are out sick with COVID-19, are burned out and leave health care, or find less stressful jobs a year and a half into the profession, Kaleel said.

Recently all 20 intensive care unit beds at Kadlec have not been used, because not enough staff trained for the ICU was available to safely care for 20 patients.

“Virtually everyone” admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 treatment is unvaccinated, Matheson said.

Otherwise healthy young people are being hospitalized for COVID-19, including some ill enough to require treatment in the intensive care unit, he said.

Vaccinated people also can be infected with the coronavirus, but they usually have milder cases that do not require hospitalization, he said.

Last year, when personal protective equipment was in short supply, Washington state ordered a stop to some procedures considered elective.

Kadlec does not have a blanket stop on procedures currently, but the surgical team looks at what can be done day to day and hour to hour and a small number of procedures have been postponed, Kaleel said.

But if trends continue, more procedures may have to be rescheduled, he said.

On Friday, 80 people were hospitalized for COVID-19 treatment locally, accounting for 20% of all hospital patients in Richland, Kennewick, Pasco and Prosser, according to the Benton Franklin Health District.

Until this week, the highest COVID-19 hospital patient count for Benton and Franklin counties over the last year was 74 patients on a single day in late December.

Tri-Cities COVID surge

The current surge in new COVID-19 cases is fueled by the highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus, by relaxed restrictions for businesses and gatherings, and by reduced prevention and infection control behaviors, Dr. Person said.

New daily cases are high and rising rapidly, she said.

On Thursday 470 new cases in the two counties were reported. In June that would have been a high case count for an entire week, she said.

“These case counts are the highest we have seen throughout the pandemic and the rate of increase is only growing,” she said.

New cases have averaged 203 a day over the past week, up from 86 new cases a day a little more than a month ago.

Last summer when masks in stores and other public indoor spaces were required in Washington state, surveys found that 98% of Benton and Franklin county residents complied with the rule, she said.

The Tri-Cities community has not only shown they can wear masks consistently, but that masks and other steps have helped stop the rise of new cases in past waves of the disease, Dr. Person said.

Concert COVID outbreaks

Large gatherings also are contributing to the spread of the coronavirus, she said.

Tri-Cities area cases have been linked to the Whisky Music Fest, headlined by country singer Toby Keith, in Pendleton in July, she said. The East Oregonian reports that 64 COVID-19 cases, about two-thirds of them in Umatilla County, Ore., have been linked to the festival.

The Grant County Health District said that as of Friday, 160 cases of COVID-19 had been linked to the Watershed Music Festival held in the Gorge Ampitheatre at George July 30 to Aug. 1.

Cases had been found in residents of 11 Washington state counties and one Oregon county, but as yet no cases have been identified in Benton and Franklin county residents.

“The outbreak is the first one traced to an outdoor entertainment event since the lifting of statewide COVID-19 prevention measures at the end of June,” said Laina Mitchell, communicable disease coordinator for Grant County Health District.

This story was originally published August 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM.