During this public health emergency, an idiom comes to mind.
"Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst."
Local healthcare workers are thankfully working by this tired cliché.
Columbus Regional Health has been concerned Bartholomew County, and the surrounding area, could start seeing a large number of coronavirus patients that could quickly overwhelm the hospital.
In response, officials have equipped the hospital with more ICU beds, and are cross-training staff to handle any potential surges in COVID-19 patients.
Initial projections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington at Seattle suggested that the hospital needs to prepare for a potential surge of 300 patients infected with the virus, including 50 that would need to go to ICU.
On April 1, hospital employees started transforming several areas of the hospital into overflow ICU units with negative airflow spaces. By April 5, the hospital’s post-anesthesia care unit was ready to house up to 12 ICU patients, and outpatient surgery areas could handle an additional 19 coronavirus patients, nearly tripling the hospital’s ICU capacity to 48 beds.
Besides increasing ICU capacity three-fold, and securing more ventilators and protective equipment, CRH has been planning for staffing needs.
In mid-March, CRH announced that it had put plans in place to redirect staff to areas of need in response to the pandemic. This included identifying which nurses on staff had previous experience working in an ICU.
The projected surge has not yet been seen at the local hospital, but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen. An influx of positive cases can happen in an instant.
The number of positive COVID-19 cases soared on Monday, as 963 new Hoosiers were diagnosed. Twenty-six of those cases were in Bartholomew County, pushing the number of positive cases to 232 and 10 deaths at the time. Many of the positive cases came from Cass County, as data showed the number grew to 1,025 (439 new cases) after an outbreak was discovered at a Tyson Foods plant in Logansport.
With a population of just under 38,000, 2.7% of Cass County’s population was reported to have the virus.
All 2,200 workers at the plant have been tested. Some are awaiting results, which will lead to more cases popping up in Cass and surrounding counties where workers commute from.
While Cass County has had only one recorded COVID-19 death, its per-person infection rate was nearly four times greater than any other Indiana county on Monday.
If local health workers continue to bolster resources, and citizens continue to adhere to social distancing guidelines, the chances of a disastrous outbreak will shrink.
While it may seem like overkill now, it’s better to be over-prepared in case the worst happens.