Hospitals in Wichita area filling with younger, sicker COVID-19 patients, doctors say
Hospitals in south-central Kansas don’t have enough staff to keep up with the rising hospitalizations and a majority of the COVID-19 patients hospitalized are not vaccinated, doctors said during a regional video meeting.
“In short, these patients are unvaccinated, younger, sicker and staying longer at our facility,” Wesley Medical Center Chief Medical Officer Dr. Lowell Ebersole said during the Friday meeting. “Our ER volume has definitely returned to very close, if not surpassing, our pre-pandemic numbers. This is COVID and non-COVID. A different thing with the first wave was people were staying home” and now they are coming back for elective surgeries or because they missed out on preventative medicine.
Ascension Via Christi Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sam Antonios said they’ve seen nearly as many pediatric patients in the last 45 days as the previous 15 months. He attributed the rise in pediatric cases to the more contagious delta variant. That trend comes as students are just returning to school. Wichita Public Schools, the largest district in the state, doesn’t require masks. Vaccines are only approved for people 12 and older.
What Ebersole and Antonios said was echoed by doctors at Robert J. Dole VA Medical Center, Hutchinson Regional Medical Center and the Newton Medical Center — a doctor from McConnell Air Force Base was on the call as well.
“That’s probably been the trend, that very few of the patients admitted are vaccinated,” NMC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Charles Craig said.
Antonios said 94-95% of their COVID patients are not vaccinated. Vaccinated people who became sick and hospitalized often had comorbidity or were immunocompromised.
On Friday, federal officials cleared the way for people with weakened immune systems to have a third vaccine to boost their immunity. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment is expected to release more details about the additional shot next week, according to the Sedgwick County Health Department.
Other takeaways from Friday’s regional call
Antonios, citing CDC data, said people who are vaccinated are eight times less likely to catch the virus and 25 times less likely to be hospitalized and die.
Ascension, he said, had 70 COVID patients with 18 in the intensive care unit; there were 10 in early July with two or three in the ICU.
Wesley is seeing an alarming trend where about 50% of its COVID patients are needing to be moved to the ICU, which is currently at capacity.
“It’s a little bit higher than we saw with the first wave,” Ebersole said.
Wesley had 17 patients in the emergency room waiting on a more permanent bed. Wesley cut 41 beds overnight because of inadequate staffing.
Wesley sent out a news release Friday saying it was changing its visitor policy because of the rising COVID-19 hospitalizations. Starting Monday, patients will only be allowed one visitor at a time, with some exceptions. More information is available at wesleymc.com.
Rising cases, deaths
The KDHE reported 86 deaths in the last week, the Kansas Reflector reported Friday, and 88 for all of 2020.
A KDHE graph shows daily deaths have been mostly trending up since late July, but are still less than a fifth of the peak of 62 deaths on Dec. 22.
But cases and deaths are projected to rise. A projection website, put together by the Massachusetts General Hospital and Georgia Tech, has Kansas daily cases peaking in October and coming close to former highs seen in the state.
Antonios said he thinks “it’s not too late” to change the direction, if people vaccinate and wear masks.
Kansas has had 347,928 COVID cases, 12,151 hospitalizations and 5,385 deaths, according to the KDHE.
This story was originally published August 14, 2021 at 3:22 PM.