But all it would take is the virus wreaking havoc on a long-term care facility to send the hospital reeling, he said. “It has burnt its way into our community.” Now the number of cases is in the “steady double digits and continue to trend in the wrong direction.” And it was kind of like we were sitting in Hutchinson watching the smoke and the fire off in a distance in Wichita, knowing it would probably reach us at some point.” “Because of our location, and our lower population and relatively large geography, we benefited from natural social distancing. “I compare it to a grass fire,” Welch said. While areas like Hutchinson and Pittsburg have the benefit of learning from how the state’s large metropolitan areas handled the rise of cases in the spring, Welch said, it also lulled residents into a false sense of security. Hutchinson Regional Medical Center only had a handful of COVID-19 cases as recently as a month ago, hospital Vice President Chuck Welch said. The New York Times proclaimed Hutchinson as one of the fastest-growing hotspots in the country earlier this week, and Hutchinson Unified School District 308 made the decision Friday to transition to fully remote learning. Reno County last week saw the highest number of cases reported in a single day since the pandemic began. ‘It has burned its way into our community’īut facilities throughout the state are beginning to express those concerns about where things are headed. “But if the numbers continue to grow that will definitely be a concern.” “They're not pushing overly for capacity right now on either beds, ICU, ventilators, dialysis machines or staff,” he said. Still, he said, there is no danger of hospitals becoming overrun at this time. “There's too much disease in the community and we have to do whatever we can do to push it out.” “I think that should absolutely be a wake-up call that hospital capacity is strained,” he said. Norman said the issues in the southeast should serve as a warning shot. Kansas averaged 743 new cases a day for the seven days ending Wednesday, a new record since the pandemic began.Īnd while the state’s three biggest counties accounted for well over half of the state’s COVID-19 case count earlier in the pandemic, currently two-thirds of the cases lie outside of the Wichita and Kansas City, Kan., areas. Officials at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the Kansas Hospital Association maintain there are no statewide capacity issues facing hospitals at this time.īut KDHE Secretary Lee Norman has repeatedly cautioned residents about the state’s rise in cases and hospitalizations. The number of cases began to ease slightly later in the week, Cason said, and the hospital is looking to slowly resume elective services sooner rather than later. State officials say hospital capacity not an issue – yet “And so we had to take these necessary steps to do that.” “We had to basically gear up, to figure out how we were going to take care of those patients for our community and for our region,” said Randy Cason, the hospital’s president. The rise in cases also meant that Via Christi on Monday halted elective procedures in order to divert staff toward supporting COVID-19 patients, a step not taken since the early days of the pandemic in May. “Until it has impacted you personally, it is tough to wrap your minds around what exactly this means and what exactly this looks like,” she said. That means Cobb is helping out her fellow nurses now more than ever, retrieving supplies for nurses deep in the trenches with COVID-19 patients or helping to flip individuals on ventilators to help improve their breathing. Pittsburg saw a steady stream of COVID-19 infections throughout the spring and summer, Cobb noted.īut the return of students to the classroom, both K-12 and university, combined with rapidly increasing infection rates in Missouri and pandemic fatigue among residents to produce a perfect storm for a rise in cases. While hopping onto the hospital floor and helping out her staff is not unusual to her, her domain is usually that of scheduling and managing, both in Pittsburg and Via Chrsti’s emergency room outpost in Fort Scott.īut in recent days, the hospital has seen a marked uptick in COVID-19 patients, pushing the hospital and its staff in ways that they had not yet been during the pandemic. In her role as nursing manager at Pittsburg’s Ascension Via Christi Hospital, Jessica Cobb is normally tasked with making the emergency room and intensive care facilities run like a Swiss watch.
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