If Erin Bolton sounded frustrated, it’s because she was.
Bolton is a registered nurse and director of quality and regulatory at Jefferson Regional Medical Center. She was commenting last week on the record number of covid patients being cared for at Jefferson Regional.
Last September, there were 28. Last week, there were 29. That came a day before the state had more than 3,000 new covid patients, the most since January.
We understand why she and probably a lot of other health care providers across the country are upset these days.
Out of those 29 patients, 14 are in the intensive care unit with two others in regular rooms waiting for an ICU bed to open. And on that day, two people were in the emergency department also waiting for an ICU bed.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
In short, the covid patients are putting a strain on the system.
Their condition requires special treatment, in terms of the space they occupy and care they get from the doctors and nurses and other medical staff. Long hours, stressful environment — it takes its toll — and so unnecessary.
Out of those 29 patients, guess how many people have had their covid vaccination. Zero. As in not a single one.
Had those patients gotten the vaccine, probably none of them would even be in the hospital.
As Bolton put it, in the early days of covid, health care providers had no way of protecting people from covid other than to urge caution, as in wear a mask, social distance and stay out of close quarters with other people.
Today’s hospitalized patient is different.
Again, Bolton said it well, “[T]his is a decision people are making — a decision not to get the vaccination — and they are ending up in the hospital, maybe taking bed space away from a grandmother who needs it for another reason. … We know that if they had been vaccinated they would not have ended up in the hospital.”
Of course, these patients, like all others that come to the hospital, are going to be cared for. No one is questioning that element of this equation.
It’s just that all of the stress that comes with a high number of covid patients would disappear if these patients had gotten vaccinated. Put another way, it is the direct fault of these patient for being in the hospital in the first place, which is a rare circumstance indeed.
If you might dismiss this as some exaggeration of the situation, consider what happened at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. A hospital administrator there said the conditions were too much for some health care workers who left their jobs mid-shift.
“We have had people literally walk off the job, because they could not take it anymore,” UAMS chancellor Cam Patterson told CNN last week.
This is serious, and as Dr. Anthony Fauci said a few days ago, “things are going to get worse.”
And the vaccine makes it all go away.