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The U.S. hospital crisis, magnified
The federal government published detailed information on hospitalized Covid-19 patients for the first time. The data, seen in the map above, showed that many Americans live in areas where hospitals are running critically short of intensive care beds.
While we’ve had hospitalization figures from The Covid Tracking Project for some time, the new data is more granular and is revealing just how precarious the situation is in some hot spots. Places like Amarillo, Texas; Coral Gables, Fla.; and Troy, Mich., are now seeing rates of serious illness that approach the levels in New York City during the worst weeks of the spring.
Over all, more than 100 million Americans — about one in three — live in an area where hospitals reported fewer than 15 percent of intensive care beds were still available as of last week.
It’s even worse for one in 10 Americans, who live in areas where fewer than 5 percent of intensive care beds are available — or in some cases are already completely full. In El Paso, for example, just 13 of 400 intensive care beds were not occupied last week. In Fargo, N.D., there were three. In Albuquerque, zero.
The recovery rate for hospitalized coronavirus patients is much higher now than earlier in the pandemic. But when hospitals are full, experts say that maintaining existing standards of care for the sickest patients may be difficult or impossible.
In New Mexico, where I.C.U.s are full across the state, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is expected to announce that hospitals will be allowed to ration care based on who is most likely to survive. Some experts say that physicians are already rationing care, as evidenced by the declining rate at which Covid-19 patients have been hospitalized during the last several weeks. Across the country, officials have begun borrowing beds in children’s hospitals to care for adults.
Rural counties can be particularly vulnerable. In the Big Bend region of Texas, for example, cases are soaring and hospital beds are quickly filling up. The region has just one hospital covering 12,000 square miles, and no heart or lung specialists to treat serious cases of Covid-19.
A sharp increase in cases can quickly overwhelm smaller hospitals, said Beth Blauer, director of the Centers for Civic Impact at Johns Hopkins University: “This disease progresses very quickly and can get very ugly very fast. When you don’t have that capacity, that means people will die.”
The New York Times