U.S. non-Covid patients suffering because hospitals filling up with unvaccinated covid patients

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U.S. non-Covid patients suffering because hospitals filling up with unvaccinated covid patients

Wed, 2021-09-22 10:21 — mike kraft

... Echoes of the pandemic’s early months are resounding through the halls of hospitals, with an average of more than 90,000 patients in the United States being treated daily for Covid. Once again, many hospitals have been slammed in the last two months, this time by the Delta variant, and have been reporting that intensive care units are overflowing, that patients have to be turned away and even that some patients have died while awaiting a spot in an acute or I.C.U. ward.

In this latest wave, hospital administrators and doctors were desperate to avoid the earlier pandemic phases of blanket shutdowns of surgeries and other procedures that are not true emergencies. But in the hardest-hit areas, especially in regions of the country with low vaccination rates, they are now making difficult choices about which patients can still be treated. And patients are waiting several weeks, if not longer, to undergo non-Covid surgeries.

“We are facing a dire situation,” said Dr. Marc Harrison. the chief executive of Intermountain Healthcare, the large Utah-based hospital group, which announced a pause of nearly all non-urgent surgeries on Sept. 10.

“We do not have the capacity at this point in time to take care of people with very urgent conditions yet are not immediately life threatening,” he said at a news conference.

In some of the hardest-hit areas, like Alaska and Idaho, doctors are taking even more extreme steps and rationing care.

When they can, some hospitals and doctors are trying to seek a balance between curtailing or shuttering elective procedures and screenings — often lucrative sources of revenue — and maintaining those services to ensure that delays in care don’t endanger patients. ...

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