SC hospitals plead for help as COVID situation grows dire, say worst is yet to come

Health systems in the Midlands are rapidly approaching crisis status as record numbers of COVID-19 patients, most of them unvaccinated and many younger than in prior surges, inundate the area’s largest hospitals and stretch the limits of facility staffing and capacity.

And it’s almost certain to get worse if more people don’t step up and start adhering to prescribed COVID-19 measures, doctors say.

“Our current surge, the trajectory is much steeper than we were back in January, and we fully expect to surpass our peak that we had back in January,” said Dr. Steve Shelton, an emergency medicine physician and Prisma Health’s incident commander in the Midlands. “This is serious business for us. I want to stress that we need help. We need our community to step up and support us.”

Leaders from the largest health systems in the Midlands held a joint media briefing Friday morning, one day after Upstate hospital officials held a similar gathering and shortly before the state announced its third highest single-day COVID-19 case count on record, to sound the alarm about the escalating situation and beg for the community to mask up, get vaccinated and take safety precautions.

“We’re all suffering from the same constraints and the same wave of delta that’s making its way through the Midlands,” said Dr. Cale Davis, chief of staff and medical director of emergency medicine at Medical University of South Carolina in Columbia. “The situation in the Midlands is dire. The COVID cases are rising faster than the health systems can handle. Hospitals are quickly becoming overburdened and staff are becoming fatigued.”

Davis implored community members to protect themselves and others by wearing facial coverings and rolling up their sleeves.

“We cannot keep putting this kind of strain on our staff members and expect for more nurses to suddenly appear to take care of all of these patients,” he said.

South Carolina, which had just over 100 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 statewide early last month, now has more than 2,100, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Friday’s total of 2,138 COVID-19 inpatients is the most since late January, and only about 300 off the single-day record of 2,466 set Jan. 13.

Dr. Brent Powers, Lexington Medical Center’s chief medical officer, said in just seven weeks the health system had gone from having four COVID-19 patients to nearly 200, including 41 who are intubated.

“We have hit an all-time high water mark in our 50-year history on ventilators,” he said. “At one point last week, we had close to 70 patients on ventilators. Unfortunately, some of those patients have not survived and our ventilator numbers have come down.”

‘Trust us now’

Hospital officials said today’s COVID-19 patients are younger and healthier on average and have more reserve to fight the disease than patients they treated in prior surges.

As a result, many are spending multiple weeks in the hospital before recovering and being discharged, or dying.

“What we’re facing is an increasing length of stay because of the younger patient population,” Powers said. “We need more beds to take care of the same number of COVID patients.”

As the number of COVID patients has increased, hospitals have become increasingly strained trying to prioritize care for the sickest ones.

They’re pulling nurses out of administrative roles and into patient care, delaying care for patients with less immediate needs and suspending procedures.

“Throughout these last few weeks, we’ve been having to shuffle patients constantly, trying to make more room for more patients,” Davis said. “There’s only so much that you can do with the number of staff that you have.”

Despite considerable staffing and capacity difficulties, hospital officials said that, for now, they’re able to meet the surge. That could change, however, if people don’t start modifying their behavior.

“Is this going to be a three-to-four-week thing or is this going to be a three-to-four-month thing?” Powers said. “If it’s three-to-four months, our community is going to suffer in ways that I don’t think it has ever experienced before.”

The Lexington Medical Center physician pleaded for residents to stop relying on social media for their health information and to instead listen to medical professionals.

“You trust us for your mammograms, you trust us for stress tests, you trust us for your colonoscopies,” Powers said. “Trust us now. Wear your mask, get your shot. Please.”

This story was originally published August 27, 2021 at 11:28 AM with the headline "SC hospitals plead for help as COVID situation grows dire, say worst is yet to come."

Zak Koeske

The State

412-334-2443

Zak Koeske is a projects reporter for The State. He previously covered state government and politics for the paper. Before joining The State, Zak covered education, government and policing issues in the Chicago area. He’s also written for publications in his native Pittsburgh and the New York/New Jersey area.