The following week, a critical-care doctor in Nebraska warned, “The assumption we will always have a hospital bed for is a false one.” “The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question,” an infectious-disease doctor told our colleague Ed Yong early last month. Throughout that time, health-care workers have worried that hospitals would soon be overwhelmed. The number of hospitalized patients has increased nearly every day: Since November 1, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 has doubled since October 1, it has tripled. The current rise in hospitalizations began in late September, and for weeks now hospitals have faced unprecedented demand for medical care. Several lines of evidence are now sending us the same message: Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, causing them to restrict whom they admit and leading more Americans to die needlessly. The pandemic nightmare scenario-the buckling of hospital and health-care systems nationwide-has arrived. For the first time since the pandemic began, more than 100,000 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States, nearly double the record highs seen during the spring and summer surges. On Wednesday, the country tore past a nauseating virus record. When the Sun Belt frothed with cases this summer, hospitalizations again reached the 60,000 mark before they started to fall.Ī month ago, in early November, hospitalizations passed 60,000-and kept climbing, quickly. At the springtime peak, even as northeastern hospitals faced a deluge, 60,000 people were hospitalized nationwide. Yet that worst-case scenario never came to pass at a national level. “There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed,” Liz Cheney, a leading House Republican, said a week and a half later.
“We’re doing everything we can to not allow that worst-case scenario to happen.”įear of this scenario drove many of the most stringent stay-at-home orders in the spring. “If, in fact, there’s a scenario that’s very severe, it is conceivable that will happen,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, said in mid-March. Many people will unnecessarily suffer and die. The quality of care will fall Americans who need hospital beds for any other reason-a heart attack, a broken leg-will struggle to find space.
Faced with a surge of severely ill people, doctors and nurses will have to put beds in hallways, spend less time with patients, and become more strict about whom they admit into the hospital at all. It is possible, they said, for the number of coronavirus patients to exceed the capacity of hospitals in a state or city to take care of them. Since the beginning of the pandemic, public-health experts have warned of one particular nightmare.
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