GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — Area hospitals are bracing for more and more COVID-19 patients locally as the coronavirus pandemic continues to hit new heights.
Aurora Baycare Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brian Johnson says numbers are up across the board.
“We’re hitting all time highs both from a daily infection rate to the positivity rates, to just inpatient census,” Johnson told reporters Friday.
It wasn’t all bad news, however. First, Johnson says area hospitals have been planning for a surge for some time, and are beginning to put plans into place to deal with the increase in cases.
“There’s no question that a surge in COVID cases will be challenging, but we prepared for this,” Johnson said. ” We knew it could happen, and we’re ready.”
Second, there has actually been an improvement in the percentage of hospitalized coronavirus patients that are winding up in the intensive care unit.
“It does seem like we’re seeing at this time less ICU sick COVID-19 patients as compared to earlier on in the pandemic,” Johnson said. “There are some measures now available to us to help potentially decrease the risk of a patient becoming ICU sick.”
Hospitals have been issuing warnings about their capacity for weeks as COVID-19 numbers have grown, but Brett Healy, with the MacIver Institute, criticized the way hospitals have been reporting their numbers on Tuesday’s “Regular Joe Show” on WTAQ.
“Our hospitals are not nearing capacity because of a huge increase in COVID patients to the hospital,” Healy told host Joe Giganti. “We’re getting near capacity because they are operating as normal and treating other diseases, and doing other procedures, and so when you add in the relatively small number of COVID patients, that’s when you start to see these capacity numbers get get closer to 85%-90%.”
Johnson, when answering questions from reporters, did corroborate that they are indeed seeing a higher number of patients in general admitted to the hospital, not just COVID-19 patients.
“We are seeing a high number of hospitalized patients in general for a multitude of other medical issues as well as COVID-19,” Johnson told reporters. “It’s sort of a double stress as we’ve been seeing it over the last seven days.”
There are 129 COVID-19 patients currently in Brown County hospital beds as of Friday afternoon. That’s the highest seen yet during the pandemic.
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