With ICUs stressed, Wichita area hospitals ‘holding their breath’ on holiday COVID surge

With intensive care units fuller in the Wichita area than anywhere else in Kansas, health care workers are anxious about a potential surge in the coronavirus pandemic following the December holidays.

Some area hospitals are treating fewer COVID-19 patients now than they were a week ago, said Dee Dee Dewell, who does outreach work for Ascension Via Christi. However, the south-central Kansas region as a whole has seen a slight increase in hospitalizations.

“Everybody’s just kind of holding their breath now as we get through the holidays to see if we’re going to stay steady or see if that surge happens from social gatherings,” Dewell said.

Dr. Richard Watson, of Cheyenne Mountain Software, assists smaller hospitals with transferring patients to larger facilities. It currently takes approximately 3 hours, 15 minutes to find a bed for a patient, regardless of whether the patient has COVID-19.

“We know that the hospitals are still critical capacity or near critical capacity,” Watson said. “And while we take away from this a little bit of relief that we haven’t gotten worse, I think with 90 million people moving in the U.S. over the Christmas holiday, the chances of seeing first and second week of January something different, we need to catch our breath here but be ready for what could be ahead.”

Dewell and Watson were panelists during a Tuesday teleconference on the hospital situation in south-central Kansas. The weekly virtual reports, hosted by Wichita businessman Jon Rolph, are a partnership among state government, the Kansas Hospital Association and local hospitals.

On Monday, the Sedgwick County Health Department reported zero available ICU beds at Ascension Via Christi and Wesley Healthcare medical facilities in Wichita. The area hospital status was listed as “critical.”

All approximately 208 ICU beds at public hospitals in Sedgwick County have been full since the start of November. However, Monday’s figures were the best they have been in more than a month. Combined, the two hospital systems were treating 219 total patients with COVID-19 and had 66 of those in ICUs.

Those numbers peaked at 273 total COVID-19 patients on Nov. 30 and 88 COVID patients in ICUs on Nov. 16.

“The Wichita hospitals do continue to be very busy,” Dewell said. “Our ICUs are still very, very much full. While I still feel there is a little more room now where I feel like we have more cushion of we are taking more transfer patients, especially the non-COVID ones.”

Hospitals in south-central Kansas have 281 total staffed adult ICU beds.

Only about 10% of those ICU beds are available, according to Tuesday’s report from the Kansas Hospital Association. That is the lowest figure of any hospital region in the state. The statewide number is 21%.

“It’s important just to understand that generally there’s enough people needing care from a non-COVID standpoint this time of year that the hospitals are near capacity generally anyway this time of year,” Rolph said.

Patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 account for a significant proportion of the patients in local hospitals. They currently occupy about 35% of ICU beds in south-central Kansas, compared to the 55% occupied by non-COVID patients.

The region has 98 patients in an ICU bed with confirmed or suspected COVID-19. There are 29 staffed ICU beds available.

With 337 total confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients occupying an inpatient bed, the 31 hospitals in south-central Kansas collectively have 1,129 staffed inpatient beds that are available. That’s about 37% availability, which is lower than the statewide figure of 40%.

Jon Miller, an ICU nurse at Hutchinson Regional Medical Center, said visitations are sometimes done through hospital windows.

“There’s nothing like the hospital experience of being able to have loved ones come in and spend time ... but in this time, the patient pretty much goes it alone,” Miller said. “... When these patients are in these rooms, the doors are closed. There’s the slow, quiet roar of an air filter in the negative-pressure rooms. We try to minimize going into those rooms.”

“The care, what I found with these kind of patients is just the level of intensity, just day in and day out it’s more of the same. Some people recover, albeit slowly. Others, that was not going to be a part of their story.”

Community support has been meaningful to him, such as sidewalk chalk along the walk to the parking lot, especially as death counts climbed.

“The number of deaths from the middle of November to the first part of December, it seemed like we had more people succumbing to the effects of COVID than we had getting out of ICU,” Miller said. “That takes a toll.”

Wichita’s region is being hit harder by staffing shortages, which have been compounded by isolation and quarantines of health care workers. Some doctors and nurse have been infected through community spread. Some hospitals have become coronavirus clusters.

“A higher percentage of hospitals anticipate staffing shortages this week,” Rolph said. “I’m sure some of that is related to the holidays.”

“Staff has been the core issue most recently, and is an issue this week.”

About 52% of hospitals in south-central Kansas anticipate critical staffing shortages this week, which is the worst figure for any region in the state The statewide figure is 38%.

“The good news from a public health perspective is the case counts have gone down,” said Seth Konkel, a public health worker in Sedgwick County. “... We are seeing more counties getting to that green level (of the positive test rate). The bad news is that COVID is still alive and well in south-central Kansas and not going anywhere anytime soon. So don’t let those decreasing numbers fool you.”

Kansans still need to follow health guidelines, including wearing a mask, Konkel said.

Kansas Department of Health and Environment data show the south-central region had the state’s worst positive test rate last week at 14.51%. The statewide figure was 11.17%.

The regional figure was down from 15.05% for the previous week and 19.13% for the first week of the month.

Wichita’s area was the third-worst of seven regions for the rate of new cases per 100,000 people, but the most recent KDHE data for that indicator is two weeks old.

“The good news is the vaccine is here, it is in Kansas and it is actively day-to-day being administered,” Konkel said. “The bad news is we don’t have enough for everybody ... it’s months away from getting to where we can start vaccinating the general public.”