’Hands down the toughest surge’: Kansas City hospitals pushed to limit with omicron cases
Hospitals in Kansas City and across the region are continuing to be pushed to their limits as the number of COVID-19 cases surge due to the omicron variant, hospital leaders said Wednesday.
While some hospitals reported a possible plateauing or peaking in cases, hospital leaders continued to warn that conditions remain worse than the delta surge last August.
“COVID cases have doubled, hospitalizations and deaths are setting records and hundreds of health care workers workers with COVID have caused major surgical delays,” Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer for The University of Kansas Health System said during a briefing Wednesday morning.
“This is hands down, hands down the toughest surge the medical community has had to face since the pandemic began two years ago.”
Eighteen chief medical officers and other leaders who spoke at the briefing said staffing shortages continue as health care workers are coming down with COVID, elective surgeries remain on hold and a high number of patients are dying from what they say is mostly a preventable disease.
While there has been a steep decline the number of cases from the omicron surge in various parts of the United States, that’s not the case in Kansas, Stites said.
“Kansas is seeing the largest per capita increase in cases of any states in the United States, not exactly the place you want to be,” he said.
At AdventHealth Shawnee Mission, conditions are slightly better than they were two weeks ago, but they’re still much worse than they were at when delta peaked in August, said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Lisa Hays.
The hospital’s peak was on Jan. 11, when it had 82 patients with active infections and 13 patients that had recovered.
As of Tuesday, the hospital had 63 patients with active infections, including six in the ICU. The majority of the patients in the ICU were on ventilators. The hospital had nine patients holding in its emergency room awaiting admission, with the longest wait being 32 hours.
The hospital also had 20 patients who had recovered from their infection for a total of 83 patients, she said. The hospital currently has 95 employees out with COVID.
“We are having to cut down on some of our elective procedures that require a bed,” she said. “Last week and this week, we have cut our procedures by 50%. But a lot of times, not only are our staff out sick, but our patients are also sick and having to delay procedures because they have COVID as well.”
The number of patients at HCA Midwest Health, which has seven hospitals in the Kansas City area, has improved slightly, said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kimberly Megow.
HCA Midwest Health reported that it had 286 patients at its hospitals, which was down from its peak of 354 on Jan. 18.
“That still represents 25% of our inpatient volume, so we’re still really stressed,” she said. “It is still much higher than the previous peak from a previous surge in August, which the peak at that time was 212.”
Of its 286 patients, 38 are in the ICU with 17 of those on ventilators. As of Wednesday morning, there were 62 COVID patients in hospital emergency rooms, which she said is quite congested. HCA Midwest’s mortality rate is about 11.2%
“I think there’s a perception in the community, and some of that’s accurate, that the omicron variant is not as severe overall and there’s some truth to that,” she said. “But for the patients who are hospitalized, it is continuing to be a severe illness and requiring lots of resources to care for them.”
HCA Midwest’s hospitals have seen a slight improvement also in their ability to take transfers, but that “waxes and wanes pretty quickly” depending on what is occurring in the local emergency rooms, Megow said.
She also questioned the accuracy of a recent report that said majority of staff shortages at hospitals across the country is related to asymptomatic employees who have tested positive and had to be sent home.
“I would disagree with that at least for our hospital system,” she said. “The employees who had to go home are sick. They’re testing positive and they’re sick.”
Liberty Hospital has also seen a a slight decline from a peak last week, said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Raghu Adiga. It has 44 COVID patients, with 10 in ICU and 9 of those on ventilators.
“I truly hope that this is actually a downward trend and not just a blip — I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said.
The hospital continues to see shortages, included with staffing, testing and medications used to treat COVID.
The hospital has seen 30 deaths so far in January.
“In the years being here, I have not seen these kind of numbers ever, pandemic or otherwise,” Adiga said.
Other hospitals in the Kansas City area also reported feeling the impact of the ongoing omicron surge in the metro, including Olathe Health, where it has “throttled back” on surgeries, especially the ones that were going to result in a patient needing a bed, because they were having to go on diversion for other issues like patients with major heart attacks and strokes, said Dr. Elizabeth Long, chief medical officer.
Dr. Mark Steele, chief medical officer for University Health, said the health system’s two hospitals saw its all time high of COVID patients last week — at one point all its ICU beds were full and some ICU-level patients were being held in the emergency department awaiting beds.
On Wednesday, it had 126 COVID patients at its hospitals, which was about 35% of its total licensed bed capacity. Its hospitals also saw a high number of deaths, 39 so far in January, nearly double its previous high of 22 deaths in August.
The demand for COVID testing remains high.
“We continue to perform about 500 tests per day between our two drive-thru testing sites and our test positivity rate was nearly 40%, but has begun to drop off some over the past few days down into the mid-30s,” he said.
The University of Kansas Health System reported 116 COVID patients with the active virus Wednesday. Twenty-four of those patients were in the ICU, with 18 on ventilators. The hospital had another 103 patients in the recovery period, for a total of 219 patients.
The idea that omicron variant is just a cold is “just plain wrong,” said Stites with the health system.
This story was originally published January 26, 2022 at 11:49 AM.
