St. Louis hospitals are not being overrun with COVID patients
Validating today's story on BJC's announced delay on elective procedures
This story was in my local paper this morning:
Fortunately while I was refreshing a Power BI file, I had some extra time to do some validation.
There are two stops I make every morning to keep a close eye on the current trends. The county health department has this dashboard, where I monitor newly reported cases:
So yes, St. Louis County is currently in the middle of an expected Omicron wave. And bear in mind this is not counting any home tests or untested individuals, so the true count of infections is much higher.
The second stop I make is at our state health department’s COVID dashboard, where they have a tab dedicated to hospital trends, helpfully broken out by region:
So the hospitalized cases are rising along with the case count, though not as dramatically.
But remember this interview that Anthony Fauci gave last week:
Speaking to MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin, who was filling in for Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night, Fauci suggested that some of the children currently being treated at medical facilities were hospitalized with COVID as opposed to "because of COVID."
He added that some children who are currently listed as being in hospital with COVID may actually be receiving treatment for "a broken leg or appendicitis," rather than for a severe reactions to the virus.
I confirmed this is happening in local hospitals, that if a patient tests positive they are counted as a COVID hospitalization and isolated in the dedicated COVID ward. So what I might expect to see in something like Omicron that’s so contagious is that people would be much more likely to test positive for it, but be there for other reasons entirely. So the hospital’s total occupied beds would stay flat, but a larger share of them would be dedicated to COVID protocols.
Much like this chart of occupied beds vs. capacity for all inpatient and ICU:
The total number of occupied beds has remained relatively flat since last fall, even as the number of COVID-positive patients has risen and fallen.
But maybe BJC’s hospitals are getting a larger share of these patients than their competitors? Now we can utilize the federal HHS dashboard of hospital capacity, to which all hospitals must report on current occupancy for Medicare regulatory reasons. So let’s look at BJC’s biggest hospitals:
Barnes-Jewish:
Missouri Baptist:
St. Louis Childrens:
Christian Hospital:
(Bear in mind that hospitals want to operate with ICU capacity as near 100% as they can to maximize profit and optimize workforce. They can always flex capacity to expand as necessary.)
They have plenty of capacity left, so what is causing them to cancel elective surgeries (which they define as surgeries that don’t need to be performed within the next four weeks)? From the Post article:
Hospitals here are facing their largest wave of COVID-19 patients since the beginning of the pandemic, and the health system said Wednesday that nurses and other staff are "stretched to their limits," and some need to be reassigned to other areas of the hospitals to meet the most urgent needs…
Over the past week, medical providers throughout the region have said staffing is further strained because, with such high rates of the virus circulating in the community, many employees are catching COVID-19. In a message to staff, BJC similarly said its workers are "getting sick in record numbers."
I’m sympathetic to hospital workers being burned out and getting sick, but mightn’t having to isolate a quarter of their patients under COVID protocols have something to do with that? And how many doctors and nurses quit over BJC’s vaccination requirement, who got COVID in 2020 and for whom a vaccine (which hasn’t been updated for Omicron) would provide nothing but downside?
This is a problem of BJC’s own making, fueled by a hospital system built to run at near-capacity constantly. And the Post-Dispatch is more than happy to keep the narrative going because that’s what they’ve done consistently since spring 2020.
What a great report... very informative. This class of propagandists aren't thinking about the likes of real thinkers and researchers like you! Thank you!