MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The continuing spike in coronavirus activity has hospital officials again looking at contingency plans to prepare for the possibility of a surge in virus cases.
At WVU Medicine, President and CEO Albert Wright said they are watching the situation closely and consulting with other hospital systems to anticipate what level the surge will reach.
“We’re taking a watch and see approach,” Wright said,” I have read that more folks are getting the vaccine around the country and that’s our best defense at this point.”
For well over one year, healthcare workers have had around-the-clock schedules fighting the virus, while managing personal protective equipment supplies, visitation policies and the severity of the virus. According to Wright, this has been the most challenging period for many in the healthcare field.
“Last December and January were probably the hardest time in my career and for those on the frontline it was definitely the hardest time in their career,” Wright said,” They don’t want to see us go through that again.”
Around July 4, hospitalizations had dropped to 52, but since they have made a steady rise to 178, 64 are in the ICU and 25 are on ventilators. Additionally, active cases have been increasing as well signaling hospitalizations could continue to climb.
In January of 2021, hospitalizations reached a pandemic high of more than 800.
More than ten years ago, a study done by the National Academy of Sciences raised concerns about a national shortage of nurses, physicians and healthcare support workers.
The pandemic has made it even harder to hire and keep healthcare workers.
“We’re all struggling for nurses and frontline staff right now, so it would be hard for us to manage a surge,” Wright said,” We’d get it done, we always do, but it would be more challenging than it was at the beginning of the year when we had those high numbers.”
As numbers rise, Wright said they have resumed planning meetings and are again looking at contingencies in case the surge is sustained.
“We’re reopening some of our incident command centers and looking at what happens if we see a tick up, or a rapid tick up,” Wright said,” If we have to convert some of the units we’ve use in the past back to full-time COVID we’ll have to do that.”
Data from the DHHR shows new daily cases have number more than 100 since July 26. After falling below 1,00 active cases of the virus now number 2,585. Cases of the Delta variant have increased to 118.
“I hope we don’t see what we saw in January, I’m optimistic we won’t, but we’ll be ready if we have to be,” Wright said.