Even in an area where 9-of-10 people ages 5 and older have received at least one Covid shot, the hard math of the omicron surge is straining hospitals and health care workers.
Registered nurse Jessalynn Dest looks across the room while treating a Covid-19 patient in the acute care unit of Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle, on Jan. 14, 2022.SEATTLE — For a health system pushed to the brink, Harborview Medical Center’s health care workers hardly let it show.
Jesus Aguirre Medina, a Covid-19 patient with a nutritionist looking over paperwork in his room in the acute care unit of Harborview Medical Center, on Friday.Instead, with Covid hospitalizations climbing to new heights and expanding the hospital well beyond its usual capacity, it was the grind of caring for so many patients that was threatening to break the short-staffed operation.
The number of beds used for Covid-positive patients had more than doubled in the past two weeks, from 967 to 2,057, the analysis showed. Harborview Medical Center is one of four hospitals in Seattle operated by UW Medicine, a university-affiliated medical system. Across its four campuses, the system counted 194 patients that were Covid-positive Thursday, which is 70 more than the previous high during the peak of the delta wave.
So far, patients at Harborview Medical Center with Covid were faring better than during previous Covid waves. “Most of our patients with asymptomatic Covid are vaccinated folks,” Lynch said. “A lot of the folks that we see with symptomatic Covid, and certainly folks in critical care, are folks who are unvaccinated.”
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