Covid and Hospitals: How are things now?

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Just curious. Here in DFW I see hospitalizations are rising to 14%. How are things in the hospitals? Are things relatively normal? No more furloughs?

Please share. I am not in acute care, but I am of course very interested in the effects on acute care staff.

Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.
1 hour ago, CrunchRN said:

Are boarders patients waiting for a room to be available?

Yes. We have a lot of admitted boarders waiting for a bed to open for days. We have emergent behavioral health patients boarding in the ER literally for months waiting for placement. 

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23 hours ago, gere7404 said:

They closed down an entire unit? Like, you guys have empty beds just sitting there??

They were small units about 8 PTs max, they were used at first for ICU overflow or Cath Lab when COVID hit they closed CL and used overflow for RO/Pos. Now both are closed. I'm sure they'll open back up eventually. Now the RNs and CNAs just float around like orphans.

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Specializes in Clinical Research, Outpt Women's Health.

Wow Rose Queen. Amazing.

 

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Asked one of the "refuge nurses" how long was he going to be an orphan?

He laughed and replied "I don't know"

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Specializes in Public Health, TB.

Our county case numbers remain high--11 per 100,000 per day.  And hospital inpatient census has tripled in the last week. The New York Times labels us at "very high risk." Vaccine rate is 67% for at least one shot. 

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Specializes in Clinical Research, Outpt Women's Health.

Any idea why the numbers are so high? That is a pretty good vaccination rate.

Everything here is pretty much "back to normal" and the 2-3% positivity rate seems stable. I think for Tarrant county the vaccination rate is about 50ish percent for fully vaccinated.

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Specializes in Public Health, TB.

about 40% of our county distrusts government, vaccines and science. Their faith will protect them. They do not cooperate with contact investigations and won't isolate/quarantine. That, plus variants are resulting in on-going spread and younger people getting seriously ill. 

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Specializes in Clinical Research, Outpt Women's Health.

Oh boy. That is hard to combat.

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On 6/8/2021 at 9:36 AM, nursej22 said:

about 40% of our county distrusts government, vaccines and science. Their faith will protect them. They do not cooperate with contact investigations and won't isolate/quarantine. That, plus variants are resulting in on-going spread and younger people getting seriously ill. 

Well, that makes sense.  Even if the majority of your county gets vaccinated, if the remainder completely disregards any and all risk-reduction measures, the virus is still going to spread.

I read that people who contract the virus now are being hospitalized at a much higher rate than those who contracted it earlier, probably due to stronger variants. 

I'm in CT, and our cases and positivity rates are both low, while our vaccination rates are high. While I am seeing people not wearing masks now that it is no longer required, I would say a majority of the people in any given store wear them, which actually surprises me. 

I wonder if it's kind of become almost a matter of manners to wear masks because there's no way for a stranger to tell if you're mask-less because you're fully vaccinated or if you're mask-less because you don't believe in COVID and engage in risky behavior.  So when I'm in a restaurant where the servers are masked, I wear my mask when ordering.  When I'm in a store where the workers are masked, I make sure mine is on properly, too.  I just feel like it's a way of reducing stress towards those in service jobs.  Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I really think social norms play a huge role.

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Specializes in clinic nurse.

I tend to think that what's going to happen is that, due to lack of vax availability, vaccine disinformation, vaccine hesitancy, denial and refusal, is that the virus will simply remain endemic in this country. We still have TB, and of course TB exists in other parts of the world, so coronavirus (SARS2) will also be endemic in other parts of the world. I wish it would go away, but for now, what's happened with TB is the model I use. I may well be wrong.

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Specializes in Public Health, TB.
4 hours ago, JVBT said:

I tend to think that what's going to happen is that, due to lack of vax availability, vaccine disinformation, vaccine hesitancy, denial and refusal, is that the virus will simply remain endemic in this country. We still have TB, and of course TB exists in other parts of the world, so coronavirus (SARS2) will also be endemic in other parts of the world. I wish it would go away, but for now, what's happened with TB is the model I use. I may well be wrong.

Except that there is no effective vaccine to prevent TB infection. 

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6 hours ago, nursej22 said:

Except that there is no effective vaccine to prevent TB infection. 

True, but does TB mutate at the rate coronavirus does?  I feel like corona is going to be more similar to influenza in that you can never quite get ahead of it because it will keep slipping around vaccines.

Along with that, I wonder if mRNA technology will eventually make a flu vaccine that is more effective than our current vaccine models.

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