MISSION, Kan. (AP) – When COVID-19 patients flooded St. Louis hospitals, respiratory therapists who arrived for another tiring shift with an ever-decreasing supply of ventilators used to look at their tasks and cry, going into the locker room to recompose.
“They were like, ‘Dude, 12 more hours of hard work for these patients on the verge of death who could go anytime.’ And knowing that they had to take care of them with that kind of stress on their heads, ‘”recalled Joe Kowalczyk, a respiratory therapist who sometimes works as a supervisor.
Now, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States has dropped by 80,000 in six weeks, and 17% of the nation’s adult population has received at least one dose of a vaccine, providing some relief to frontline workers like Kowalczyk. On their most recent shift at Mercy Hospital St. Louis, there were only about 20 coronavirus patients, compared with about 100 at peak winter peak.
“It is so strange to look back,” he said. “Everyone was definitely reaching the limit of their judgment at the end, just because we were doing it for a long time at the end of the year.”
The United States has seen a dramatic turnaround since December and January, when hospitals were packed with patients after the holidays and pandemic fatigue caused an increase in the number of cases and deaths. Health officials acknowledge the improvement, but note that hospitalizations are still on par with previous peaks in April and July and just before the crisis worsened in November. Deaths are still persistently high, although much lower than the peak in early January, when they sometimes exceeded 4,000 a day.
Missouri hospitalizations were hovering around 3,000 a day over the period from late November to January, but have since dropped by about 60%. On Monday, 1,202 people were hospitalized, according to state data.
In Wisconsin, hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in the past three and a half months, from a maximum of 2,277 patients on November 17 to 355 on Wednesday, according to the Wisconsin Hospital Association. And the patients who are hospitalized are not so sick. The number of intensive care patients has fallen by 81% since November 16.
State health officials on February 15 removed all employees from a field hospital installed in October at the state fairgrounds in the suburb of Milwaukee. They stopped dismantling the facility, concerned that the state might experience an increase in cases triggered by variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.
“It is an act of balance. You don’t want to close it anytime soon until you really believe that we are on the other side of this pandemic, but we don’t want to tie it up (the fairgrounds) for a long time if we really won’t need it, ”said the Assistant Secretary of the Services Department. of Health, Julie Willems Van Dijk.
Behind the overall positive trends in hospitalizations, there are worrying indications that the worst may not have passed, said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“Last week, we saw a slowdown in the decline,” said Mokdad. In many states, hospitalizations are either stabilizing or actually increasing.
The biggest factor in the overall decline in hospitalizations in the U.S. is people’s behavior in December and January, Mokdad said. For the first time in the United States, the wave shape is symmetrical, with a decline as steep as the rise.
“This has not happened before in the previous two waves,” said Mokdad. “For us in the business, it’s like, ‘Wow, we’re doing something really good now.’”
In Minnesota, hospitalizations in non-intensive care fell from about 1,400 in late November to just 233 on Tuesday. The number of patients in intensive care has dropped about 85% since the beginning of December, to just 59 patients on Tuesday, according to state data.
Hospitalizations in Illinois hovered around 6,000 patients for several days in late November, but dropped to 1,488 on Monday, a decrease of about 75%. The number of intensive care patients also fell, from 1,224 on November 25 to just 361 on Monday, according to the state health department.
In hard-hit California, hospitalizations have dropped an impressive 70% since January, from 22,821 patients on January 5 to 6,764 on Tuesday. The number of intensive care patients dropped from 4,971 on January 10 to 1,842 on Tuesday, according to state data.
In Kansas, where many rural hospitals have no ventilators, the situation was so dire that patients were flying hundreds of miles for treatment.
But the number of hospitalizations in the state fell by almost 84%, from 1,282 on December 2 to 208 on Sunday, according to the state health department. More than 300 people were in intensive care in December; this has dropped to just 50 now, state data show.
“It’s kind of quiet here with COVID,” said assistant physician Ben Kimball, who works primarily at Graham County Hospital in Hill City, a town of about 1,500 in rural northwest Kansas.
At the height of the sudden increase, he once decided to take a patient to a hospital in Denver, some 250 miles away. All of the nearest hospitals capable of providing more advanced care were overcrowded and refusing patients.
“We are very lucky, I think,” he said. “I can definitely feel that things are looking up. We are not constantly fighting for sleeping space. We had some COVID patients watching overnight, but we haven’t sent anyone out in a while.”
Kris Mathews, the administrator of Decatur Health, a small hospital in rural northwest Kansas, also spent hours on the phone arranging transfers for patients at the peak of the increase. His own employees fell ill, and those who worked overtime well taking care of patients with coronavirus.
“I could feel the fatigue and fatigue of the team,” he wrote. “Nobody complained to me, but I could see and feel them burning”.
It has been weeks since the hospital treated a patient hospitalized for coronavirus. On second thought, he said, “I couldn’t be more proud.”
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Richmond reported from Madison, Wisconsin. AP medical editor Carla K. Johnson of Washington State also contributed to this report.