COVID-19 Deaths Rise as Hospitals Struggle to Keep Up With Patient Surge

Over the past month, hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in the US have increased more than twice. And while hospitals are struggling to keep up the surge, the death rate keeps rising. 

COVID-19 Surge Poses an Ethical Dilemma for Healthcare Practitioners  

As the pandemic crisis is getting worse, a data analysis by NPR backs up the thesis of health care researchers and Dr. John Hick, claiming that the hospital workers "accept a small amount of risk each time that we expand our capacities" and it is not "unexpected that we're going to have some worse outcomes."

Hospitals’ guideline for disaster management, which is named crisis standards of care, teaches health staffers how to make ethical and clinical decisions when they are short on resources, however, this doesn’t make the current situation easier. 

According to Dr. Dan Hanfling, there is a huge difference between helping one patient and maximizing the benefits for many, thus hospitals have bypassed the rules to "maximize, to the closest extent possible, the usual standards of care."

Dr. Kate Butler claims that there is "a lot of language around 'we're right on the edge of entering crisis capacity,' but what I'm worried about is that there's kind of a blurred entry." According to Dr. Butler, "potentially people dying — because they're not getting the care that would otherwise be offered to them."

Meanwhile, Dr. Paul Horvath told Wisconsin Public Radio that as "every bed in northwest Wisconsin was full," he was forced to manage ICU-level care in his ER for hours, “which is obviously not routine."

The NPR data shows that since the beginning of the pandemic, coronavirus death rates have fallen for hospitalized patients, however, as hospitalizations keep rising, the mortality rate increases, which is "definitely something we need to pay more attention to," Dr. Bilal Mateen says.