The winter surge of coronavirus cases could push some hospitals “to the breaking point,” Dr. Dara Kass, an emergency physician at Columbia University Medical Center, said Monday.
Kass said that some areas being hit hardest by the current surge in coronavirus cases are also the least equipped to handle them.
“When you look at Utah, or Montana or the Dakotas, they just have such a fewer number of ICU beds and specialists, that when they get at capacity, it's going to be a breaking point for them in a way it wasn't for us in the coastal cities and states,” she said at an online event hosted by Stat.
Kass noted that there are a limited number of people who can help respond to the surge.
“There is a fixed resource – not just hospital beds and personal protective equipment, but also respiratory therapists, doctors, nurses, even janitorial staff – and when those resources get stretched, at some point the entire system really does break down,” she said.
Coronavirus patients often need more time and resources in the hospital than other patients, Kass added.
“They’re in the hospital for weeks on end, even if they survive,” she said. “That hospital bed is taken up for a very long period of time.”
Adding to the hospital capacity issue, Kass said that every non-coronavirus patient “gets prioritized against the sickest Covid patient.”
“It's nearly impossible for us to prioritize all of those critical illnesses while managing the coronavirus, when we're constantly having to do infection control and mitigation from this virus to those patients,” she said.