Why Are Some Hospital ERs Now Overflowing With Non-Covid Patients?

It’s an issue that cropped up in recent weeks, and no one really has a good answer. Once filled with Covid-19 patients in need of critical care, many hospital emergency departments around the country are now overflowing with seriously ill patients not suffering from Covid-19. The cases can range from a variety of issues, but all seem to be worse than previously seen, and require more attention than some hospitals are able to give.

Call it pent-up demand? Or patients skipping routine appoints since last March causing graver issues now? Either way you choose to look at it, some emergency rooms are still strapped despite Covid cases being on the steep decline in most areas.

The initial report came from the Kaiser Health Foundation and was written up by NPR. The results are disturbing since there aren’t any good reasons why these patients are coming into the ER at record rates with such serious life-threatening illnesses:

Inside the emergency department at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Mich., staff members are struggling to care for patients who are showing up much sicker than they’ve ever seen.

Tiffani Dusang, the emergency room’s nursing director, practically vibrates with pent-up anxiety, looking at all the patients lying on a long line of stretchers pushed up against the beige walls of the hospital’s hallways. “It’s hard to watch,” she says in her warm Texan twang.

But there’s nothing she can do. The ER’s 72 rooms are already filled.

Keep in mind, these are not Covid patients, they’re suffering from other non-Covid illnesses which have taken a more severe turn. This may be the result of patients who avoided medical care for months, perhaps well over a year now, and some of the results are creating backlogs in hospitals around the country with more severe manifestions:

Visits to emergency departments dropped to half their normal levels, according to the Epic Health Research Network, and didn’t fully rebound until the summer of 2021.

But now, they’re too full. Even in parts of the country where COVID-19 isn’t overwhelming the health system, patients are showing up to the ER sicker than they were before the pandemic, their diseases more advanced and in need of more complicated care.

Months of treatment delays have exacerbated chronic conditions and worsened symptoms. Doctors and nurses say the severity of illness ranges widely and includes abdominal pain, respiratory problems, blood clots, heart conditions and suicide attempts, among others.

By the stats, it looks like ER patient visits are reaching and in some cases exceeding pre-pandemic levels, but the patients coming in are much sicker than would typically have been seen before Covid. Patients have let health issues fester, as many warned during the days of lockdowns and closures, and the results are now bearing out where people who put off care are being forced to deal with life-threatening health problems.

Contributing to these issues is, you guessed it, Biden’s vaccine mandate which is causing staffing shortages in every industry, including health care. The issue among nurse shortages continues to be a problem which means hospitals have less capacity in general to offer, especially as a new wave of seriously ill non-covid patients arrive:

Every morning, Dusang wakes up and checks her Sparrow email with one singular hope: that she will not see yet another nurse resignation letter in her inbox.

“I cannot tell you how many of them [the nurses] tell me they went home crying” after their shifts, she says. “And you just hope they show up the next day for more.”

But despite Dusang’s best efforts to support her staffers, check on them regularly, talk with them about their careers and make them feel seen, heard and appreciated, she cannot stop them from quitting. And they’re leaving too fast to replace, either to take higher-paying gigs as travel nurses, to try a less-stressful type of nursing or to simply walk away from the profession entirely.

In an already stressful environment, vaccine mandates are causing a continued strain in many hospital systems that have chosen to fire employees refusing vaccination. Take this story from Phoenix, as an example, where a local emergency department is on the verge of a doctor exodus over mandatory Covid vaccinations:

“I think there’s going to be somewhat of an exodus of people who are reluctant to get it,” said Dr. Shad Marvasti, Associate Professor and Director of Public Health and Prevention at The University of Arizona College of Medicine, Phoenix.

“I’m sure it will be under five percent that will leave, but again we’re already stressed, and we need that little bit,” said Dr. Frank LoVecchio, an ER Doctor at Valleywise Health and other Phoenix-area hospitals.

Five percent seems small, but for a workforce already right, it’s make or break for some hospital services, especially emergency departments that need to be staffed 24-hours a day.

Other hospitals, besides the one mentioned in the NPR piece, are also experiencing more prevalent and serious non-Covid illness:

As of Monday, McLaren Port Huron had reached 100% bed occupancy with 24 coronavirus patients and four in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

The at-capacity measurement differs from in late 2020 when the state’s weekly COVID hospital update showed dozens more patients affected by the virus.

“You can see our numbers aren’t really any different than they have been over the last couple of weeks. It’s in the 20s — you know, they’re steady,” McLaren Port Huron spokeswoman Jennifer Carbary said in an interview Tuesday.

Even as Covid cases recede, hospitals will still be hard up for availability as sicker patients are forced into needed critical care for ongoing health problems. Many doctors warned back in 2020 that the results of lockdowns and suspension of certain procedures and elective surgeries would lead to a further health crisis down the road. Well, we’re now down the road and we’re now arriving at that point.

Some have speculated that the spike in non-Covid ER visits could be related to vaccine side-effects, though no direct correlation for that claim yet exists. For the moment, it looks like pent-up demand and a lack of care for non-Covid health issues are now creating a tsunami of serious conditions causing ER demand to exceed pre-Covid levels in some areas.