We keep hearing about the over-worked, under-served, totally excused hospital staff that are suffering on the front lines of the war against the Coronavirus.
That may be true in ICU’s in some cities, but that’s not the whole story.
Here is the rest of it:
With some hospital beds empty, healthcare workers go on furlough
TUCSON, Ariz. (KOLD News 13) – In the midst of an international pandemic which is still weeks away from its predicted peak, some hospitals on Tucson are furloughing some of its staff.
Which ones and how many isn’t clear yet, but it’s enough to catch the attention of some government officials who worry it could have an effect on the COVID-19 response when cases begin to spike.
“They are being forced to make some very, very hard decisions as they see their revenue streams shrink,” Pima County Chief Medical Officer Dr. Francisco Garcia, said. “And some of those decisions have to do with staff.”
Huntsville Hospital system furloughs and reduces hours for 2,000 employees
A spokesperson for the Huntsville Hospital System confirms that approximately 2,000 employees have had their work hours reduced or been furloughed.
The reductions in work hours and furloughs are due to a “low census” at the hospital caused by the stoppage of elective procedures at the hospital’s facilities due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Kentucky hospital to furlough 300 employees in ‘unprecedented times’
St. Claire HealthCare in Morehead, Ky. announced on Thursday that it will furlough 300 employees who are not involved in direct patient care to maintain its financial security after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The furloughs impact about 25% of the hospital’s workforce and will take place March 26. Those employees will still receive insurance and hospital officials said they hope the cuts are temporary. Other remaining staff will experience a reduction in hours.
In the past few weeks, St. Claire HealthCare has suspended elective procedures to free up bed capacity. That has significantly reduced revenue, the system said in a statement.
Mayo Clinic announces sweeping pay cuts, furloughs
The state’s largest private employer is instituting across the board pay cuts and furloughs to shoulder a projected $3 billion loss this year.
Mayo Clinic’s cost-cutting measures follow its decision in mid-March to halt elective surgeries and procedures — a move that was quickly applied statewide as part of Gov. Tim Walz’s executive order to suspend non-critical medical procedures not deemed essential to save a life.
“The decision to eliminate elective surgeries and outpatient visits was the right decision in terms of protecting the safety of our patients and staff, and also preserving limited PPE (personal protective equipment),” said Chief Administrative Officer Jeff Bolton. “But it has led to significant reductions in revenues.”
Bolton said the hospital in Rochester is at about 35 percent of capacity, while capacity in Mayo’s surgery services is at about 25 percent.
80 hospitals furloughing workers in response to COVID-19
Many U.S. hospitals and health systems have suspended elective procedures to save capacity, supplies and staff to treat COVID-19 patients.
As a result of suspending these nonemergent procedures, several systems have lost or expect to lose a large chunk of their annual revenue, forcing them to make cost reduction a top priority.
Notice a trend?
Everyone from the Federal government on down was reliant on the Univerity of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation model for the spread of Coronavirus. The initial model radically overestimated the number of needed hospital beds and ventilators for COVID patients.
Updated COVID-19 estimates find that need for hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators needed to deal with the COVID-19 epidemic are less than previously estimated.
Based upon the initial estimates, hospitals across the country put a hold on “elective” procedures, or procedures not immediately life-threatening. Not just surgeries like gender-transition addadicktomes but things like hip replacements and cancer surgeries.
So hospitals let operating rooms and recovery rooms sit empty. They didn’t take in revenue. They prepared to be swamped and full of dying COVID-19 patients.
The thing is, outside of a few places, like New York City, Chicago, and Detroit, these hospital swampings never happened.
A month ago, this headline was published:
Coronavirus: Tucson Has Acute Hospital Bed Shortage, Report Says
The report, using data compiled by the Harvard Global Health Institute, says Tucson would need to add another 2,750 beds over a 12-month period, or 2.3 times the number that currently exist. That’s assuming a “moderate” outbreak in which 40 percent of Tucson area residents require hospitalization for coronavirus infections.
As of 2018, Tucson had 2,680 total hospital beds, of which about 56 percent were occupied, potentially leaving only 1,180 beds open for additional patients.
Pima County, Arizona had 591 Coronavirus cases.
The Huntsville Hospital system has over 1,800 beds but Madison County only had 186 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with the number of new cases trending downward.
Morehead is in Rowan County, Kentucky. The latest news from Rowan County is that they have had a whopping ONE Coronavirus case, and it was diagnosed three days ago. St. Claire HealthCare is a 159-bed hospital with a staff of over 1,200 people.
Assuming that they followed the national guidelines, they have been shut down for almost a month doing absolutely nothing but treating ER cases.
It seems that this is the pattern across many places in America. Hospitals set aside nearly all of their available space and resources for a COVID-19 surge that never materialized and now that the month has rolled over and the billing is being done, the hospital accountants are having to deal with the fact that hospitals took in only a small fraction of their usual revenue.
So the bean-counters are doing what the bean-counters do and are furloughing or laying off staff in these departments that were shut down as elective or unnecessary during the Coronacrisis.
Of course, no hospital wants to be the first to turn the elective services back on, just in case the surge comes and get savaged by the media or sued by angry patients.
As a result, we still have patients suffering from diseases who need surgeries, hospital beds sitting empty, and medical staff being downsized.
Huntsville, Alabama, rural, Kentucky, and much of the rest of America are not New York City, and to apply New York City guidelines to our hospitals based on models of virus transmission for places like New York City did not help and only harmed them.
When this is all over, the nationwide canceling of routine scheduled procedures will probably go down in history as the biggest over-reaction to COVID-19 and the subsequent furloughs as the biggest fuckup.
From putting non-life-savings surgeries on hold to shuttering Synagogues on Passover and Churches on Easter, when the dust settles, I suspect that many people outside a few high population density hotspots are going to be very, very pissed off by how much disruption they had to endure for a problem that wasn’t really a big problem in their area.
Yep.
Imagine *MY* conversation when I get invited back to my clinic!
Better half’s cousin works in a senior health care center and is positively losing her shit over this scare. The county she lives in has confirmed cases of .03% (yes, that’s a decimal) and zero deaths.
Where I live, it’s less than one third of that. Went shopping today. One big box store has all staff wearing masks and mandated a ‘one cart / shopper’ rule so if you go in w/ your spouse, each one of you has to have a cart. Every other store I went to, about the only staff wearing masks are direct food handlers (ie deli/bakery) and a lot less shoppers wearing them.
This is all political at this point. The poll support is going to start dropping and the smart politico’s are going to start easing restrictions. Other, especially D governors, are going to yell “Orange Man Bad” and keep them in place until even the media starts turning on them.
“When this is all over, the nationwide canceling of routine scheduled procedures will probably go down in history as the biggest over-reaction to COVID-19 and the subsequent furloughs as the biggest fuckup.”
But you can’t *say* that! If you do, you’re anti-science.
Also, if you question why a model that went from predicting 2mil deaths to 60k deaths in the span of two weeks should be trusted at all, the universal response is “you’re too stupid to understand models.” They still can’t admit that the 2mil number was wrong, even now.
A post-mortem of this entire situation will likely reveal that all of this was unnecessary. The disease was already spread around the world before any of this “hunkering down” was put in place.
Seriously, the first case in the US was confirmed on Jan 20?
I find that impossible to believe. There are direct flights three/four times a week from Wuhan to both San Fran and NYC. These flights were going on, uninterrupted for months before the US had their first confirmed case. Even if the flights were running 60% full, that is still over a thousand people a week, direct from Wuhan to both NYC and SFO.
So, which is it? Either this disease is so easy to catch that standing less than six feet away from someone is too risky for the government to allow it…
-OR-
This disease is so difficult to catch that thousands of people coming into the US direct from Wuhan, none of them were infected.
Can’t be both. This virus has been spreading throughout the country for months prior to any quarantine orders. Additionally, it is no where near as deadly as the models predicted.
Protect yourself from it, absolutely, but closing down the economy was not, is not, warranted in this situation.
I agree. I can’t wait for the antibody test, I believe that we will find that there were millions of Americans who had it and thought it was the flu.
I had an interview around Valentine’s Day at Marshall Space Flight Center, which is where the first confirmed case in Huntsville came from. A few days after that I was so sick I couldn’t move. I had a fever, cough, and body aches like I never had before. The fever and coughing refused to die. I went to the doctor. He tested me for the flu, strep, and bronchitis and all came back negative.
For lack of anything else to do he loaded me up on antibiotics and send me home. It was the only time during my unemployment that I was glad I didn’t have a job because I was out of commission for about 10 days. I just spent most of my time sleeping and feeling like hell.
I had a flu shot in October so I just assumed it was a strain of flu that the shot missed.
Now I suspect that there was a first strain of COVID-19 that went around between November and February that most people thought was the flu (and I had it), and what is killing people is a second strain that mutated and is worse.
That’s just my theory, but I know a bunch of people who got just sick as hell in February with a fever and cough that lasted a week and all wrote it off as a bad chest cold.
The WSJ had a piece on this subject today.
It feels like a special case of a general problem: the “shut down everything” approach is a big government blunt tool approach to the problem. It may be effective, but it’s also excessive. For example, as my wife pointed out a week or two ago, a factory in which the work stations are dozens of feet apart clearly has “social distancing” and there is no rational argument for the government to shut it down.
Here in CT a number of people I know we’re sick with flu/strep negative illnesses that persisted for two weeks in the begining of February. It is a credible theory that most people had encounter Corona virus and developed immunity or did not get infected or we’re sick from it by the time shutdown started.
However, I think it is disengenuos to say hey we didn’t have and outbreak! See that is proof we didn’t need to shutdown! That’s the point of shutting down to prevent an outbreak….
I also agree a one size fits all approach is not right for everywhere, obviy NYC needed more extreme measures to control the virus spread than a small Midwest town.
I think it scared the shit out of people in control and they knee jerked because they weren’t even close to prepared to deal with anything like this, kind of like how our response is to any major and potentially dangerous event.
I’m skeptical we will ever actually know if shutting down was necessary or not. Legitimate question to that, how do you even measure that? I don’t think you really can.