Tina Freese Decker, CEO of Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health, along with government Gretchen Whitmer and dr. Joneigh Khaldun, the state’s chief medical officer, called on Michigan residents to remain masked and follow social protocols.
The state has spread 991 outbreaks and a ‘broad community’, Khaldun said. It was a week of terrible numbers, with Michigan leading the country in new infections, hospitalizations and the percentage of people who tested positive for COVID.
“What’s going on,” Brian Brasser, chief operating officer of Spectrum, said in an interview: “Our track looks very, very much like it did in the first part of October.”
Therefore, Spectrum was among those who canceled some procedures.
“Every time we decide to postpone procedures like this, it does not come easily because we realize that the risk is associated with deferred care,” Brasser told the Free Press. “But we also need to make sure we provide good, safe and effective care, and we realize that it was important for us to do that with the increase in COVID inpatient activities and a generally high census in general.”
Other health systems made the same choice, including Michigan Medicine, the Henry Ford Health System’s Macomb County Hospital in Clinton Township, and Mercy Health Muskegon Medical Center.
If the rate of business continues to rise, leaders of Beaumont Health, McLaren Health Care, Ascension Michigan and Sparrow have said they will consider similar measures.
Meanwhile, public health officials, including those charged with contact detection and other health efforts, are struggling to keep up.
“Our public health system is overwhelmed, we can not keep up, with all our new cases coming in every day,” Khaldun said.
On the inside
This is a dreaded deja vu, with some notable differences, several health professionals have told Bridge Michigan and the Detroit Free Press over the past few days.
The fear of the unknown disappeared when the coronavirus first struck last spring, and the rage scurried around personal protective equipment.
But the stream of meals provided by the community is also gone and so are the wishes of the frontline workers in those early days.
And the camaraderie forged in the early chaotic days began to crack here and there, not necessarily in front of patients, but behind the scenes.
“People quarrel because they are stressed,” said Josephine Walker, a nurse at Ascension Providence Rochester Hospital and a vice president of the Nurses’ Union, OPEIU Local 40.
Jeff Morawski, a longtime nurse and president of OPEIU Local 40, who represents nurses at McLaren Macomb Hospital in Mount Clemens as well as the Ascension site, is a well-known, deep-seated bone fatigue.
‘There are cases, there are operations, there are procedures. The ERs are filled, ‘said’ We are breaking out of the seams. ‘
And that inevitably means it’s patients waiting. And wait.
Colleen Rowland said she waited seven hours Tuesday in a packed emergency room at Beaumont Hospital in Taylor – with kidney stone pain and a raging urinary tract infection.
“It just didn’t look like I was in the US anymore,” said Rowland, 25, a worker at the recite.
According to her, she arrived at the emergency room that morning after suddenly pulling pain and vomiting along the way to her work. She was told in an urgent care setting that she needed hospital care.
“You get used to being privileged, not having pain,” Rowland said. But ‘everyone in that room was unhappy. There were people who just slapped buckets on their seats. ‘