MISSION, Kan. (AP) – When COVID-19 patients st. Louis hospitals flooded, respiratory therapists who would arrive another grueling shift with a dwindling amount of ventilators regularly looked at their orders and cried into the locker room.
‘They were like,’ Man, another 12 hours of this battle of these patients who’s about to die, who can go at any moment. “And just knowing that they had to take care of them with that kind of tension in the back of their minds,” recalls Joe Kowalczyk, a respiratory therapist who sometimes works in a supervisory role.
Now, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US has dropped by 80,000 in six weeks, and 17% of the country’s adult population has received at least one dose of vaccine, providing some relief to frontline workers such as Kowalczyk. On his most recent shift at Mercy Hospital in St. Louis. Louis, there were only about 20 patients with the coronavirus, down from as many as 100 on the crest of winter.
“It’s so weird to look back on it,” he said. “Everyone definitely hit their end just because we did it for so long at the end of the year.”
The US has experienced a dramatic turnaround since December and January, when hospitals were full of patients after holiday gatherings and exhaustion of pandemics caused an increase in cases and deaths. Health officials acknowledge the improvement, but point out that hospitalizations are still at the same level as earlier in April and July, and just before the crisis worsened in November. Deaths are still consistently high, although much lower than the peak in early January, when it was sometimes more than 4,000 a day.
Hospitalizations in Missouri hovered about 3,000 per day during the late November to January, but have since fallen by about 60%. According to the state’s data, 1,202 people were admitted to hospital on Monday.
In Wisconsin, hospitalizations have dropped dramatically over the past three and a half months, from a peak of 2,277 patients on Nov. 17 to 355 on Wednesday, according to the Wisconsin Hospital Association. And the patients admitted to the hospital are not that sick. The number of patients in intensive care has fallen by 81% since 16 November.
On February 15, state health officials removed all staff from a field hospital set up at the state exchange in suburban Milwaukee in October. They have stopped dismantling the plant out of concern that the state may experience a boom in cases caused by variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.
“It’s a balance. You do not want to close it too soon before you really believe that we are on the other side of this pandemic, but still we (the fair) do not want to tie too long if we really do not have the Julie Willems Van Dijk, Deputy Secretary of the department of health services, said.
Behind the overall positive trends in hospitalizations, there are worrying hints that the worst may not be over, said Ali Mokdad, professor of health sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“Over the past week we have seen the decline slow down,” Mokdad said. In many states, hospitalizations are declining or increasing.
Mokdad said people’s behavior in December and January was the biggest cause of the overall decline in U.S. hospitalizations. For the first time in the US, the waveform is symmetrical, with the decrease as steep as the rise.
“This has not happened before in the previous two waves,” Mokdad said. “For us in the business, it’s like ‘Wow, we’re really doing something good right now.’ ‘
In Minnesota, non-intensive care hospitalizations decreased from about 1,400 to just 233 from Tuesday to the end of November. According to state data, the number of patients in intensive care has dropped by about 85% since early December to just 59 patients on Tuesday.
Hospitalizations in Illinois hovered about 6,000 patients at the end of November, but dropped to 1,488 by Monday, a decrease of about 75%. According to the health department, the number of patients in intensive care has also dropped, from 1,244 on November 25 to just 361 on Monday.
In severely affected California, hospitalizations have dropped by 70% since January, from 22,821 patients on Jan. 5 to 6,764 on Tuesday. According to state data, the number of patients in intensive care fell from 4,971 to 1,842 on January 10th.
In Kansas, where many rural hospitals do not have ventilators, the situation was so dire at one point that patients were flown hundreds of miles for treatment.
But the number of hospitalizations in the state dropped nearly 84%, from 1,282 on Dec. 2 to 208 on Sunday, according to the Department of Health. More than 300 people were in intensive care in December; it is now only 50, the state’s data shows.
“It was just as quiet out here with COVID,” said Ben Kimball, MD. He works primarily at Graham County Hospital in Hill City, a city of about 1,500 in the northwestern part of Kansas.
At the height of the boom, he once took the opportunity to fly a patient to a hospital in Denver, about 402 miles away. Increasingly, hospitals that could offer advanced care were full and turned patients away.
“We’m pretty happy, I think,” he said. “I can definitely feel that it’s going better. We do not constantly struggle to have a place to sleep. We’ve had some overnight COVID patients, but we did not have anyone out in a while. ‘
Kris Mathews, the administrator of Decatur Health, a small hospital in northwest Kansas, also spent hours on the phone arranging transfers for patients at the height of the boom. His staff became ill themselves, and those who worked well were overtime caring for coronavirus patients.
“I could experience the staff’s fatigue and tiredness,” he wrote. “Nobody complained about it, but I could see and feel them burning out.”
Now it’s been weeks since the hospital cared for an inpatient for a coronavirus. When he thought back, he said, “I can no longer be proud.”
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Richmond reported from Madison, Wisconsin. AP medical writer Carla K. Johnson in Washington state also contributed to this report.