Wichita hospitals fill last ICU beds and move to contingency plans

Wichita’s two major hospitals have zero available intensive care unit beds after a spike in coronavirus disease patients.

Ascension Via Christi and Wesley Medical Center had a combined 111 COVID-19 patients, with 60 of those in ICU beds as of Monday morning, Sedgwick County spokesperson Kate Flavin said. All 208 ICU beds were in use, though “both hospitals are managing through contingency operations.”

Those are the highest hospitalization numbers reported by the Sedgwick County Health Department since the pandemic hit Kansas.

Mayor Brandon Whipple said Wichita is not yet at the point where non-COVID patients are dying preventable deaths due to a lack of hospital ICU beds and staff.

“We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close, if we don’t all start working together to take this thing seriously,” he said.

Ascension Via Christi Chief Nursing Officer Carla Yost said the hospital system has a record-high of 70 COVID-19 patients on Tuesday.

“We are constantly accepting patients, transferring patients among units as they improve or need a higher level of care, and making preparations for them to discharge from the hospital to home or another level of care as they can safely do so,” Yost said in a statement. “Our COVID-19 units ... have at times been at capacity and we have had to expedite our discharge process to make room for additional patients. We continue to use a phased approach to ensure that we can safely care for patients seeking care, opening new beds and adding staff, including 60 registered nurse travelers, as we can.”

Wesley Medical Center spokesperson Dave Stewart said the hospital system hit a high of 40-plus patients this week.

“Suffice it to say we were at capacity across the hospital as of (Monday) morning ... and were looking at implementing our surge plan, which has been in place since January,” Stewart said in an email. “Unfortunately, hospital capacity is not simply a matter of available beds — it is a matter of staffing those beds. Due to increasing infections among hospital staff, as well as an ongoing shortage of nurses both locally and nationwide, staffing is increasingly becoming an issue.”

Last week, the hospital systems reported its largest number of COVID-19 patients. An Ascension Via Christi spokesperson said at the time that the hospital had adjusted its number of COVID-19 beds as the virus spread and contracted during the pandemic.

Ascension Via Christi filled its COVID-19 beds last week despite adding beds the week before.

“We have to take COVID more seriously today than we did any other time this year because it’s more likely to catch COVID in Wichita and the surrounding areas than it’s ever been,” Whipple said. “For the first time, we are having problems at our hospitals when it comes to ICU capacity.”

The Sedgwick County Health Department provides a weekly snapshot of COVID-19 hospital figures on Mondays. Flavin said in an email that this week’s numbers were updated on Tuesday. Prior to the update, which showed all 208 ICU beds were full, the previous high was 195 from last week.

The 60 ICU beds with COVID-19 patients was up from last week’s record-high of 39. The dashboard starting showing hospital figures using the current reporting system at the end of June. The numbers represent a single snapshot in time.

The total amount of COVID-19 patients also was a new high at 111; the previous record last week’s 90 patients.

“Why are these numbers increasing?”

Adrienne Byrne, the director of the county’s health department, told Wichita’s school board on Friday that COVID-19 numbers on the weekly metrics report are likely going to continue to rise.

“What this (report) doesn’t tell us is why — why are these numbers increasing? ... We really don’t know,” she said.

Stewart, the Wesley Healthcare spokesman, said anecdotal evidence suggests gatherings of family and friends are a major source of the increase.

Whipple said the increase is due in part to a “perfect storm” of people becoming fatigued of prevention measures, longing to see their family and moving events indoors as the fall weather grows colder.

“We had a serious push for things to get back to normal with school, with sports, with work,” he said. “When the numbers were lower, people let their guard down.”

COVID trend reversed

Indicators for community spread of the coronavirus in Wichita had improved for much of August and September. By the middle of September, the positive test rate had dipped below 5%, new hospital admissions were declining and the rate of new cases had dropped out of the red zone for the first time in months.

But the trend reversed around Sept. 20, and indicators quickly worsened. A month later, on Oct. 20, the City Council allowed its mask law to expire without a discussion as the numbers spiked. Now, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s data showed Sedgwick County just experienced its worst week of the pandemic.

“The city dropping its mask ordinance at a time when the numbers were rising sent a really bad message to the public,” the mayor said.

Sedgwick County still has a mask order in place, but it has a significantly weaker enforcement mechanism than the city’s ordinance, which resulted in a total of three $25 tickets. Whipple said those citations went to establishments that continued to violate the law. The three citations were enough to gain compliance, he said.

Statewide case rates, deaths and hospitalizations have increased enough recently that Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, asked Republican legislators last week to consider a special session to approve mask legislation. GOP lawmakers responded by asking that they first urge voluntary mask use and local requirements, she said. Kelly agreed to take that approach first.

Whipple said that state legislators stripped the governor of some of her emergency power earlier in the year, assuming the pandemic virus would weaken during the summer.

“That really kicked the responsibility down to local elected officials,” he said. “You have the school board, who are volunteers, who are making life and death decisions, and they don’t have a health department. .... We need leadership. History will say we could have done better with collaborative leadership.”

At the federal level, congress and the president failed to pass and sign another stimulus before the election.

“The reality is you can’t have a healthy economy without healthy people,” Whipple said.

Whipple, who has been the primary advocate for Wichita’s now-expired mask law, said “the politics got really nasty.” The mayor became the target of death threats that were texted to a city council member who opposed the law, police have alleged.

“People in our medical community who were posting their experiencing online were becoming victims of hateful comments, being called a liar,” Whipple said. “It’s not discourse. I don’t know what it is about this subject that is triggering to some people.”

There is hope as the pandemic worsens, the mayor said.

“We’ve controlled this before,” Whipple said. “We knocked these numbers just a couple months ago. This is dumb virus with no strategy. We know how to prevent it. The idea that we need to just give in to the virus and surrender and let it ravage our high-risk populations — we just need to take this seriously and put our guard back up. We can’t give up. Our economic future really depends on it right now.”

This story was originally published November 3, 2020 at 11:48 AM.