FAIRHOPE – With the surge in COVID-19 cases, some patients in local hospitals are being treated in halls, while others on ventilators are in emergency room beds waiting for space in filled intensive care units, doctors told school system officials Thursday, Aug. 19.
Dr. Doug Sharp has been an emergency room physician in Baldwin County for 12 years, working most of that time at Thomas Hospital. At a Baldwin County Board of Education discussion on requiring students to wear masks, he said the surge in COVID-19 cases has overrun local hospitals.
“You can have the mask arguments and debates, but you need to understand that if you’re not scared of COVID, you need to be scared of your hospital system collapsing because right now, I can’t take care of your families the way we need to take care of your families,” Sharp said.
On Thursday, Thomas Hospital in Fairhope had 200 patients. The hospital has a 155 beds, he said.
“The Thomas Hospital ER has been consistently housing inpatients, people that are waiting for beds because there’s no rooms in the hospital,” Sharp said. “The hospital itself went from about five COVID patients, maybe 10, we didn’t have a lot, during early July. In the course of about two weeks, we started averaging around 90.”
He said that several days ago, every treatment room in the Emergency Room was filled with a COVID-19 patient on a ventilator waiting to be transferred to the ICU, which was also full. Other ER patients are being treated in halls, in chairs or in the lobby.
“We have and we’ve been averaging about five to seven intubated patients sitting in the ER, waiting for a bed, because there’s no ICU beds anywhere,” he said. “There’s no chance of transferring someone because every hospital in the region’s in the same situation we’re in. These ICU patients sit there until somebody upstairs either dies or clears out of the ICU.”
Sharp said one or two patients have been dying of COVID-19 each day in the last several weeks.
“I think late July until now, we’ve had 45 deaths,” Sharp said. “I’ve seen them die.”
He said that of the 45 people who died, 30 were younger than 70.
“These are not old sick people. Those are COVID patients dying. There were lot of other patients dying. Those were COVID patients,” Sharp said. “This virus variant is very different. These are people our age and I’ve seen multiple people my age very sick and die. I’ve had to intubate more people my age in the last two weeks than probably the last five years.”
He said that Thursday morning, all 10 beds in the ICU were filled with patients on ventilators, none of whom had been vaccinated.
“The mean age is 57. None of them were vaccinated. A lot of them are normal folks. OK, they’re normal, healthy folks. These are not constantly ill people. And some of you may have family that is there,” Sharp said. “I look in these people’s faces and they’re scared and they’re going to get sick and I know that of the ones that I’m going to intubate, half of them are not going to survive.”
He said oxygen services are also being stressed by the demand from COVID-19 patients.
“We have so many in the hospital that we’ve even reached capacity,” Sharp said. “We’ve overstressed the oxygen systems in the hospital. We have to shuffle patients around to make sure our oxygen systems didn’t overload. That’s bad folks and this is the current state that we’re in.”
Doctors in other hospitals also reported a surge in cases. At the USA Children’s and Women’s Hospital in Mobile, 125 children were admitted with COVID-19 in the first week in August, Dr. Heidee Custodio, a pediatric and infectious disease physician at the hospital, said.
That total is 25 percent of the 500 pediatric COVID-19 cases admitted to the hospital in the year from March 2020 to March 2021, she said.
“So, 500 in one year, 125 in one week, that’s how stark the numbers are,” she said. “It’s not just the numbers. It’s the severity of the illness for our kids.”
On Thursday, Aug. 19, 20 children in USA Children’s and Women’s Hospital with COVID-19, Dr. David Gremse, chairman of pediatrics at the University of South Alabama Medical System, said. Seven of those children were in intensive care. Three were on ventilators.
Sharp said COVID-19 began to surge again in July. He said other facilities in the Infirmary Health System have been facing similar problems.
“A few weeks ago, we had a sudden and dramatic surge in the number of COVID patients and we got quickly overrun,” Sharp said. “About four weeks ago, we all of the sudden had no space anywhere. We had patients overrunning us. At one point, we had right at 200 patients in all four of our ERs at one time. It took us by surprise. Everything had been going really well with COVID. It had pretty much gone, and everybody was fine out back having some social life again, but we quickly got overrun.”
He said the Malbis Freestanding ER has 12 beds. At one point, the facility was dealing with 49 patients at one time. “When you start hitting 25, 30 patients there at a 12-bed ER, you’re overrun,” he said.
Sharp said the demand on hospitals now is worse than at the previous peak of the pandemic.
Sharp said he believes the new outbreak will peak at some point, but the demand for area hospitals continues to be high at this time.
“As a physician who’s worked my entire career in the emergency room, you’re greatest fear is somebody dying in the lobby or dying in the waiting room because they’re waiting to be seen and I’ve been places where that’s happened and I don’t want to see that happen here,” Sharp said.
