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Kentucky Health News
Doctors from three of Lexington's largest hospital systems offered dire warnings about the influx of Covid-19 patients in their hospitals that are causing their resources to dwindle, saying the way forward lies with more Kentuckians getting vaccinated.
"We need people to get vaccinated because that's the part they can do," said Dr. Dan Rodrigue of CHI Saint Joseph Health during a virtual briefing Thursday morning. "That will decrease hospital admissions, decrease the strain on the system, allow people that need cancer care to get cancer care, allow people that need trauma care to get trauma care."
The physicians spoke at length about the strains Covid-19 patients have put on their hospital systems that has resulted in the need to scale back elective surgeries. They also spoke to the challenges around staffing issues, saying that just because a hospital has empty beds doesn't mean they have the staff to man them.
Gov. Andy Beshear said Wednesday that 21 Kentucky hospitals now face "critical staffing shortages" and that he had signed an order to grant licensed health care providers in other states permission to practice on an emergency basis in Kentucky, Alex Acquisto reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Rodrigue said they welcome traveling nurses to Kentucky, but said the reality is that nurses are leaving the state to go elsewhere because of the increased pay.
Dr. Roger Humphries, who heads emergency medicine at UK HealthCare, said the nursing shortage is a nationwide problem and the competition for them right now is great.
"We have what we have and we need to take care of our staff," he said. "And that means not burning them out and not letting them get infected by exposing them unnecessarily."
Asked if the hospitals were already rationing hospital beds, Humphries said, “We’re already having to be more selective than we would like about our capabilities because we’ve run out of certain resources. That’s just a reality. . . . It’s already causing tough decisions about capacity and who we can accept.”
Kentucky hospitals set a record of 466 Covid-19 patients in intensive care Wednesday.
The doctors said the Delta variant of the coronavirus is not only more contagious, but is also stronger than the original strain of the virus and is affecting more young people.
"I'd like to stress this is affecting younger people; it seems to be a lot more than the original strain that was here last year," said Dr. David Dougherty, an infectious disease specialist with Baptist Health Lexington. "We have people in their 30's on a ventilator."
In addition, he said the Delta variant is infecting whole households instead of just one family member at a time as was often seen with the original strain of the virus and that's causing multiple people from the same household to be admitted to the hospital.
"This virus has the potential to threaten everybody's family," said Humphries. "We're dealing with a very infectious disease. It's gotten more infectious over time, rather than less."
Calling the Covid-19 vaccines "body armor," Humphries encouraged all Kentuckians to get vaccinated, noting that there is no way to predict whether you will have a benign or a serious course of infection.
Rodrigue called these "challenging times." He said most of the hospitalizations continue to be among unvaccinated people and that the vast majority of patients with breakthrough cases are not getting seriously ill.
The doctors also stressed that the Covid-19 vaccinations are safe, noting that worldwide 4.5 billion doses of the Covid-19 vaccination have been administered and over 350 million of them in the United States.
Humphries added that if people could see what symptomatic Covid-19 patients went through in the hospital, they would understand that their fear of this disease should be greater than any fear they have of getting vaccinated.
According to Dougherty, 54 Covid-19 patients are being treated at Baptist Health, and 13 of them are in the ICU.
A UK HealthCare spokesperson said they are treating 72 Covid-19 patients. 31 are in the ICU, and seven are pediatric patients. 65 of the patients were unvaccinated.
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