Hospital Systems Still Under Pressure From Unvaccinated Covid Patients

puts a strain on hospital workers. Drew Armstrong, Senior editor for Healthcare at Bloomberg News, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Drew, Thank you appreciated. I wanted to talk about some interesting reporting you did. You spend some time with some Kentucky hospitals, just kind of observing how a lot of hospital systems are being pushed to the brink with COVID patients, largely driven by people that are unvaccinated.

You know, there's a lot of data this shows, you know, in these highly unvaccinated regions, it rives up the capacity of the hospitals. And you know, we've been following the story of hospital workers and the hospitals themselves. They're burnt out, they're overcrowded. I CU beds can become a space on I CU beds can become an issue for a lot of people. I think if you don't work in the healthcare area, or no somebody or we're at the hospital yourself, you don't see a lot of these stories. You don't

really hear what's going on there. So Drew walk us through what what some of your latest reporting ship. Yeah. I got really interested in a a couple of months ago because I think we've all heard a lot of stories, but you know, horrible things are happening to these unvaccinated COVID patients. Hospitals are really stressed. But I was interested

in how healthcare works as a system. We took a look at data from every hospital in the country, and specific we're looking at how unvaccinated and vaccinated places in a broader region kind of play off each other, and how that flows through a state's healthcare system or region's hospitals.

We identified Kentucky as the place to do that parting because they've just been through this massive wave of delta variant cases and they have some really really low vaccinated areas and then they have places that are a lot, you know, kind of on the high end, places like Lexington, Kentucky, where the University of Kentucky is. And what we found was that when this wave of cases hit the state, it started in these low vaccinated areas, a lot of

Mountain Apple, Hi. It's filled up the hospitals there and then pushed more and more patients into other hospitals around the state. By the time this wave was a couple of weeks old, you essentially had locked up the health care system where patients in these smaller hospitals that you know, they're pretty sophisticated, but they don't take care of the

really really bad stuff. You know, if you have a bad stroke, they can stabilize you, but they're going to send you on to University of Kentucky Healthcare for neurosurgery. And they couldn't do that because everyone's beds were full. There was no way of moving patients around until you had a situation where you had COVID patients who needed more extreme care who were waiting, but you also have patients who had other conditions heart attacks, strokes, who weren't

able to get what they needed. This system of transfers and hospital networks and the way you can kind of move patients around and use hospitals that higher and lower acuity. It all just fell apart in the middle of this wave and and they've put a lot of human consequences because of that. Tell me a little bit more about this transfer system, because what I said earlier, you know, a lot of people don't really realize what's going on here unless you're either part of it or had to

go through some of it. But what happens when these smaller hospitals get filled up, the rushes on to call other hospitals see where people can get transferred. And as you mentioned, there's these regional hospitals. They get pushed there, then they get pushed to University of Kentucky for the specialized cases. It's really very logistical issue that needs to be played out as well. Yeah, you know, if you live in a big city. I I work in New

York City. I live in the suburbs. It's easy to take for granted the fact that if something bad happens to hear, God forbid, there's a half dozen major academic medical centers that all operate. You know, the most sophisticated medical care in the world within twenty minutes, I mean, and and more likely closer than that. If you're in rural Kentucky or a lot of other places in the States, the hospital nearest you is probably not going to be

a big, fancy medical center. It may be a one floor, ten bed and they might have an ic U. They might have two doctors and critical access hospital. An hour away, there may be a two inter bed regional hospital. They can handle a lot, like we said, but not really really complex stuff. And then the really really nasty stuff you're going to be going to a place like University of Kentucky. They are the biggest transfer center in the country. They have a office floor where they essentially have their

transfer center. They get around two thousand calls a month from hospitals around the state and around the region where they are. You saying, Hey, we have a patient who has a really bad stroke and they're gonna need neurosurgery. You know, we've got them stabilized here, they've been here for an hour. Can you take them in. We have a COVID patient who is in dire straits. They're very young, they might be to make it. If you put them

on one of your heart lung bypass machines. Even when COVID is not happening, there's a lot of reliance on being able to move patients around in these systems. You know, not everybody and most people in the country don't have the immediate access the first hospital they go to if they're having a medical emergency, which is typically hell. How do these things happen? Is not going to be some big, fancy, highly sophisticated hospital and maybe something that can do a

little bit, but not everything. As I mentioned, you spent some time in Kentucky at Saint Joseph Hospital. Tell me about how they handled some of their waves of COVID. Because they're pretty big regional area to where you know, a lot of smaller hospitals will send people there. They had to do something called going in on divert basically telling ambulances don't come here, you know, we don't have enough space. And that's something that they almost never do.

I think it only happened twice to them before, and in the span of like two weeks they had to do it twice there. So these surges, these COVID surges, really put the strains on these hospit Yeah, and I'm glad you brought this up because it gets to what we were just talking about with kind of these systems of moving patients around a hospital like you mentioned, if they're e er is totally backed up, they will put word out to all the ambulances operating there. Yet, hey,

don't bring patients here. Usually that's not a big deal. Let's say they may do it because you know, in one case they had a tornado. That was in one of the times they went in DIVERT in the last twenty years, And that's fine because there might be another hospital thirty minutes away or fifteen minutes away and they can send ambulotes is there. When COVID hit this hospital, they had a situation where they went on DIVERT. It was the third or fourth time in August that they

had gone on DIVERT. They were undervert for two hours. They were telling ambulances go away, and then they looked around the rest of the region. Every single hospital around them was undervert as well. They said, what you saying, there's nowhere for these patients to go. We can't be on DIVERT. These people are just going to die in an ambulance. Okay, take us off, bring them here. We'll do what we can. That's what I mean when I

say the health system locks up. When you know, our health system in the U is built for disasters, but it's built for short term disasters. It's built for a big crash on the inner state and chemical plant explosion, things that last a day or a week. It's not built for a two year long, constant state of crisis. Tell me a little bit more about who's winding up in these hospitals, because a lot of time we're hearing about very mild cases of COVID uh, you know, the

amicron variant. Thankfully we're you know, hearing that they're more milder cases. We'll see what the data bears out on that. But a lot of the last surge that we had obviously had to do a lot with the delta variant. And you know, we're talking about places that have low vaccination rates too. So what else do we see in some of these places, you know, higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, So we know that these are the people

that are more vulnerable to getting severe illness. But so who is showing up at the hospitals when when the surges are happening. If you look at the demographics of vaccination in Kentucky, but this is also true of a lot of less vaccinated places in the country, and you kind of drilled down own on the groups within those places. Older people are tend to be pretty vaccinated, you know. So if you're looking at a county, let's say, with a fifty percent vaccination rate, that doesn't sound that bad.

I mean, let me be clear, it's not great. But when you look at it more closely, you realize that a lot of that is the older population, which means your younger population is very, very, very unvaccinated. This most recent variant, the delta variant, and I think we're you know, remained to be seen what's going to be happening with a macron, but it's very good at finding unvaccinated people

and finding them all at once. At St. Joseph in London, Kentucky, it's about an hour and a half south of Lexington, you heard a lot of stories about whole families that would be sick at the same time and with multiple family members in the hospital. They told me a story about a grandmother, a mother, and a son who were all hospitalized at the same time, and not all of

those people live. I mean, that is not an uncommon thing to have happened down there, because this is a virus that spreads within households most effectively, and you know, it's a lot of people who are all going to get sick at the same time. The patients that they have seen most recently in this wave. Earlier on a year ago, they were old and frail people. Now they

are younger and relatively healthy people. You know what everyone said, these are the folks you're going to see walking around the Walmart or in the Kroger or something like that. They are not sick. You know, old people who were vulnerable to any kind of illness who would strike them. And your time they're observing these hospitals as well, tell me about the human element, because this is an important part.

Doctors and nurses are burnt out, experiencing burnout. And one of the interesting things one of the physicians you spoke to said that that she feels like a failure sometimes because they think vaccines are the answers, but people don't want to listen to them. And there was a recent Gallop survey that said, you know, people are losing trust in their doctors. Small percentage, but that that was the trend. And you know here they are fighting every day. You know,

it's tough to get those messages across. How do they feel about it all? I think that burnout doesn't even get close to describe it. I met with people at a hospital called Saint Clair Regional Medical Center. They were in a truly horrific situation, and almost everybody I talked

to seems to have some level of significant PTSD. Had conversations with people who said that they put somebody in a body bag every single day for two months, that they worked, people who would come home from work and working in nursing shift in the hospital and be unable to hug their daughter because they felt so emotionally disconnected from the world. A lot of people cried to me when we had this conversation, these conversations, I cried, which

is not something I do. I've seen a lot as a reporter, and they have been through things and seeing an amount of death that I think is going to be profoundly important for whether or not these people stay in the healthcare workforce in the coming years. They are traumatized and frustrated, and they have poured their hearts and their bodies in to trying to save these people, and

they have just watched too many of them die. And they also feel like nobody outside the hospital walls has a good sense of what has been happening inside the hospital, you know, And that's exactly why I like to highlight these stories. It's tough to see what's going on in these areas in a point where everybody has COVID fatigue right now, right there's a lot of regulations, were just on lockdown all this other stuff. People are ready to move on, and these are the true things that are

still happening behind the walls. As I mentioned, if you're not going through it or part of it, or know somebody, and you're not hearing a lot of these stories. So there's a lot of really great details in Drew's piece, I suggest everybody go out and read it. Drew Armstrong, Senior editor for Healthcare at Bloomberg News, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Rome Mirrors

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