NC hospitals will run out of beds if current COVID trends continue, researchers say
North Carolina would begin to reach its capacity of hospital beds statewide in about six weeks if the current increase in COVID-19 patients needing hospitalization continues, according to a group of researchers based in the Triangle.
The supply of intensive care unit beds would likely run out sooner, in a little more than 4.5 weeks, the researchers at The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC said in estimates released Tuesday.
The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in North Carolina on a given day has nearly doubled since early November. On Tuesday, it hit a new high of 2,373, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
North Carolina hospitals currently have enough beds and staff to treat people who need to be in the hospital, whether for COVID-19 or other reasons. But the researchers at the Sheps Center say the number of COVID-19 patients has increased nearly 20% a week on average in the past three weeks, and that pace can’t continue without hospitals running out of space.
‘Less optimistic than in the past’
The researchers say that North Carolina has managed to slow the growth of coronavirus cases earlier in the pandemic, but that might be more difficult in the near-term now.
“While we hope we can achieve another reduction in case and hospitalization growth, the recent rapid growth in cases and high testing positivity ratios makes us less optimistic than in the past,” write Mark Holmes of the UNC Gillings School of Public Health and Hilary Campbell and Aaron McKethan at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy.
Their four-page paper lists other scenarios if the increase in hospitalizations changes. A rate of increase of 32% would mean hitting capacity in just 4 weeks, they say, while slowing the rate to 9.7% a week would mean reaching capacity in 12 weeks.
Gov. Roy Cooper said Tuesday that he and state Secretary of Health and Human Services Mandy Cohen had read the report and are taking it to heart. Cooper said the growing burden on hospitals and their workers was partly behind his decision to issue a new executive order requiring most businesses to close at 10 p.m. and people to stay at home between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. starting Friday.
“We know that hospital capacity is threatened here, and we can do things to prevent that,” Cooper said during a press conference. “The study showed what would happen if we aren’t doing anything else, and so we are doing that something else today to try to affect this trajectory.”
Hospitalizations in Asheville grow rapidly
Hospitals in some parts of the state have seen more growth in coronavirus cases than others. COVID-19 hospitalizations in the Asheville area are growing at nearly 32% a week in recent weeks, according to the report, while the rate in the Wilmington area has been about 12% on average. The rates of growth in the Triangle and Charlotte areas are close to the statewide average.
Hospitals can and do adjust their supply of beds and staff, by postponing non-emergency procedures, for example, or transferring patients to other hospitals with more space.
“Many factors, such as these options, influence hospital capacity,” the report says, “but they are not sustainable in the long term, and some come with important tradeoffs.”
Hospitals in the Triangle say they have not yet begun to postpone procedures the way they did last spring when they feared being overrun with COVID-19 patients.
Hospitals across the state have had months to develop and fine-tune contingency plans for increasing capacity. UNC Health, which has a dozen hospitals in North Carolina, issued a statement Tuesday saying it “remains cautiously optimistic about our capacity” as the COVID-19 numbers increase.
More worrying, said UNC Health spokesman Alan Wolf, is the increasing difficulty scheduling enough doctors, nurses and other workers at the system’s hospitals, which now have 300 COVID-19 patients, up about 50 in the past week.
“We are increasingly worried about our staffing levels, as more co-workers contract COVID in the community or are required to go out on isolation because they’ve been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID,” Wolf wrote in an email.
The Sheps report also notes that hospitals may not be able to increase their supply of beds if they don’t have the staff to care for the additional patients.
“Whereas this brief focuses on hospital ‘beds’ as the limited resource, we continue to believe a healthy, qualified healthcare workforce (particularly nurses) supporting those beds to be in shorter supply,” the researchers wrote.
The state Department of Health and Human Services tracks and publishes the supply of hospital beds, mechanical ventilators and personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves on its COVID-19 dashboard. It does not provide similar numbers for hospital staff.
This story was originally published December 8, 2020 at 11:47 AM.
