COVID patient dies in Oregon emergency department waiting for ICU bed. ‘Very real’

A person who tested positive for COVID-19 needed extra medical care.

They went to an emergency room in Oregon, expecting they could get the crucial care they needed. Instead, they died Wednesday in the emergency department because there were no beds available in the medical center’s intensive care unit, the staff at the hospital said.

“It had been several hours because other COVID positive patients had filled those beds,” staff at CHI Mercy Hospital in Roseburg said in a letter. “Even after expanding ICU care onto other floors, there weren’t any beds available for this patient.”

The patient died in the emergency department waiting for intensive care, the hospital said. Staff did not identify the patient in the letter they sent to Douglas County officials.

Douglas County is a county of nearly 111,000 people in southwest Oregon. About half of adults in the county are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to The Oregonian.

Over the course of the pandemic, nearly 6,640 people in Douglas County have tested positive for COVID-19, and 105 people have died from the virus, county officials said Wednesday.

“This is very real to our physicians, clinicians, housekeepers, and each member of our Mercy family,” hospital staff said. ”Today, we paused, we reset and we tried to move forward mentally and physically for our own well-being and serving our most vulnerable.”

Earlier in the week, health officials in Oregon said 93% of the state’s hospital beds were full, according to the Associated Press. At least 90% of ICU beds were occupied as well.

As of Wednesday, there were 845 people across Oregon hospitalized with COVID-19, according to state data.

“If you are healthy today, you may not think this impacts you,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said Tuesday on Twitter. “But when our hospitals are full, all Oregonians are at risk.”

ICU beds in short supply across US

What’s happening in Oregon mirrors what’s occurring across the country as the delta variant of COVID-19 causes a significant spike in cases. More than 78% of ICU beds across the country are already taken as of Aug. 20, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Health care workers are being forced to make difficult decisions on who gets a bed, and many hospitals are pausing nonemergency or elective surgeries to have the resources to handle the COVID-19 surge.

That can sometimes mean pushing back surgeries for cancer patients, delaying having a kidney stone removed or something as simple as removing a wart not getting done, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.

In nearby Washington, hospitalizations are at an all-time high, the state’s Department of Health said.

Intensive care units in Idaho are as full now as they were in December, according to the Idaho Capital Sun. Some of the state’s largest hospitals have paused some nonemergency surgeries.

In Texas, a Dallas County judge said there were no ICU beds left for children on Aug. 13, according to CNN.

“That means if your child’s in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect or something and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have COVID and need an ICU bed, we don’t have one,” county judge Clay Jenkins said, according to CNN. “Your child will wait for another child to die.”

ICU beds in several states are nearly gone. Health officials in Alabama said the state has no more ICU beds available. In Georgia, 94% of ICU beds are in use. Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Kentucky all have ICU capacities over 90%, Forbes reported on Aug. 18.

Most hospitalizations are people who were not fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

“The recent surge of cases has clearly impacted our hospital in ways that are unimaginable,” Oregon officials said. “We can never predict at what moment in a crisis you realize that we are human, and that we are doing the best we can, and that that is all we can ask of one another.”

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