ST. LOUIS (AP) - A top St. Louis area health official is warning that doctors and nurses are becoming exhausted as the virus surges and that the tempo gives them “little room to maneuver.”
Dr. Alex Garza, who leads a pandemic task force of 22 hospitals, said an average of more than 100 COVID-19 patients have been admitted every day to those hospitals for over a month. He said they are filling 20% of general hospital beds and 30% of ICU beds, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
The hospitals’ intensive care and medical units are about 85% full on average. More than 20 COVID-19 patients are dying every day.
“You just can’t maintain this sort of operations tempo at this rate, because it gives us very little room to maneuver. Even the slightest uptick in admissions above what we are seeing as normal now can really tip us into crisis management,” he said. “Beyond that, we can’t keep up this tempo because we are burning our staff out.”
Crisis management means doctors have to make difficult decisions on who gets the best care and who doesn’t.
“Make no mistake,” Garza said, “we continue to be in the most serious and deadly part of the pandemic.”
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