Hospitals overrun. Critically ill COVID patients without beds. A healthcare nightmare.

Governor Jay Inslee is blowing that horn again. He recently claimed that Yakima County ran out of hospital beds due to a spike in COVID cases there. That very alarming claim went out nationwide, repeated breathlessly by national and regional media. Hospital authorities had to issue a correction to stem the panic. They were not close to being out of hospital beds. They had sent 17 patients to Seattle (which has excess capacity) because COVID treatment requires larger than usual care teams.

Inslee has done this before. During the peak of virus activity in March he was sowing panic almost daily. More and more hospital beds were needed, he cried. We could see people dying in hallways or on streets. So sports arenas were converted to overflow hospital wards. The U.S. Army built a field hospital which Inslee, trailed by camera crews, toured for the benefit of evening news audiences.

None of those extraordinary facilities were required. Inslee ended up giving away the field hospital (and other materiel he had once said was in dangerously short supply). An as yet uncounted number of patients were denied medical care because the Governor’s orders had given COVID almost exclusive claim to hospital beds. We’ve since learned that our hospitals were operating far below capacity the whole time the Governor was prohibiting them from providing care. This author was one of those denied needed care.  When I finally got to the hospital where a surgery had been canceled by force of the Governor’s order, I learned that facility had been operating at 25% capacity and had been laying off nurses.

Even with Inslee’s alarming proclamations on a recent spike in COVID cases, the state is still at half the usage of hospital beds for COVID patients compared to the peak COVID bed usage. At the virus’s peak, we were nowhere close to maxxing out the state’s capacity. According to The Seattle Times’ analysis, the peak week of virus activity statewide produced only 519 COVID admissions. Currently, we have 211 COVID admissions statewide.

That is a very small fraction of Washington’s hospital bed capacity. Harrison Medical Center in Bremerton alone has at least 297 beds. Overlake in Bellevue has 347. Providence Regional in Snohomish has 468. The Swedish hospitals have nearly 800. According to the Washington State Hospital Association there are more than 5,200 hospital beds in King County. A 2019 survey found more than 10,340 staffed hospital beds statewide in Washington.

Inslee’s Big COVID Lie

We are using fewer ICU beds now than we did in September of 2019.

The State Department of Health’s tracking of hospitalizations for patients with “COVID-like” symptoms goes back to September 29, 2019. That is the earliest date on their COVID dashboard. You’ll need to click on this link and open a separate window to better understand what follows.

Immediately below is the graph you will see at frame 6. It is interactive. If you click or hover your cursor over different points on the black “all” line a table will pop up. Be patient. It comes and goes, but it is there. Those tables tell you the total number of ICU beds occupied on a weekly basis from September 29, 2019 to the present. Because this data is updated regularly, this graph as it appears today may look different after this article is posted.

 

COVID-like symptoms, according to the DOH, are fever and respiratory illness. They recognize that those symptoms include a wide range of illnesses that will not result in a confirmed COVID diagnosis. Flu is an obvious alternative diagnosis to COVID that presents similar symptoms.

This graph is superficially deceptive. One may think it shows a huge spike in demand for ICU beds in March and April 2020. It does not. It shows an increase in the percentage of ICU beds being used by men and women presenting with fever and respiratory illnesses. But the number of ICU beds being used in March 2020 was significantly less than those in the last four months of 2019.

For the week of March 22, 2020, 4,673 ICU beds were in use statewide. It dropped to 4,609 the week of March 29. On April 5 it grew to 5,766, and stayed around there through May. It dropped to 5,619 at the end of June, then moved back up to 5,915 where it is today.

These numbers are considerably below the ICU bed use in 2019. The week of September 29, 2019. saw 6,375 emergency admissions. October 6 saw 6,389. November 17 saw 6,188. December 22 saw 6,281 emergency admissions.

Thus, the number of admissions for patients requiring emergency care has been lower for the entire period of the Governor’s emergency decree than it was months before his declaration of a pandemic emergency.

What of emergency admissions for patients with confirmed COVID infections? For the entire period of time since DOH began counting, going back to the start of this year, that number stands at only 4,630. You can find that figure on the DOH COVID Dashboard and at the bottom of the “Confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths by county” table from the DOH’s coronavirus website. It is updated daily.

Many COVID patients require long periods of hospitalization, two weeks and maybe more. But some patients are turned around and released the next day (e.g., the 90-year old Jefferson County woman diagnosed with COVID in June).  Those patients who sadly die no longer occupy a hospital bed. Those who recover–which is everyone else–return home and free up their bed. DOH, curiously, does not report COVID recoveries on any table or graph I could find. I have also never heard Jay Inslee celebrate recoveries in his unrelenting press conferences.

With a staffed hospital bed capacity every night in excess of 10,300, Washington has had approximately 1.54 million bed nights during the virus’ outbreak (that is 10,300 multiplied by the number of days since the first COVID case). The total COVID patient demand on Washington’s hospitals has been far from overwhelming. That holds true even if all those patients were hospitalized for 21 days, bringing their usage to 97,230 days, or 6.3% of Washington’s hospital capacity during the period of the Governor’s emergency.

It is definitely nowhere near the doom and gloom scenarios Inslee trots out to justify yet another dictatorial edict or a unilateral extension of his emergency powers. If Inslee is repeatedly not telling the truth on this critical metric, it is hard to believe him on anything else.

[This article was edited since publication for clarification of the statistical discussion.]