Hospitals brace for COVID surge, fearing shortages, burnout

4 min readNov 22, 2020

Since the middle of October, doctors and nurses at Loma Linda University Medical Center had been warily watching news reports of a spike in COVID-19 patients in the Midwest. They knew that, sooner or later, their own hospital would be hard hit. They just didn’t know when.

Last week, they found out. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, 15 COVID-19 patients were admitted to Loma Linda, in what Dr. Michael Matus, chief of hospitalist medicine, described as “a huge rush of patients.”

“We immediately filled one ward and half of another,” Matus said. “It immediately strained the nursing staff. And then the physicians. We try to keep the physicians seeing up to 16 patients. That day, it was up to 24…. It was our biggest day in the last month.”

The coming holidays only make the situation more dire.

The recent rise in COVID-19 patients in the middle of the country has sapped the nation’s reserves of nurses and doctors, as well as masks, gloves and other protective equipment. Good news about vaccines offers hope for the future, but it’s the present that worries those who care for California’s sickest patients.

For the week ended Thursday, the most recent statistics available, the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients rose 40% in Los Angeles County. In San Bernardino County, home to Loma Linda, the number jumped 45%; in Riverside County, it was up 34%.

“We face one of the most dangerous moments in this pandemic,” Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, noted in a briefing Wednesday.

An exhausted Matus needs no reminder.

“Each morning, we review our overall resources and how to handle patients,” he said. “Staffing is problematic. No system is leaving trained physicians or nurses on standby.… There have been multiple days in the morning where the registry [of available nurses] is completely empty.”

Although new therapies “are giving us a fighting shot in the majority of patients,” Matus said, it is…

North Dakota hospitals are reportedly at full capacity amid surging coronavirus cases and a shortage of healthcare workers.

On Monday, Gov. Doug Burgum announced a new measure to address the dire situation, allowing COVID-19-positive healthcare workers who are asymptomatic to continue working on coronavirus patients, the Grand Forks Herald reported.

The shortage in healthcare workers has translated to less available hospital beds, and staffing is made more…

To the editor: Los Angeles County health officials are baffled by what’s causing the ongoing COVID-19 surge. They should drive around and observe people, then go for a walk in the evening and ask passersby to put on a mask, and see how aggresive people become.

Go shopping at a grocery store or pick up food at any restaurant, and don’t indentify yourself as a county official. Observe people’s behaviors. It’s really that simple.

CoVID-19: Forecasting the death toll

By extrapolating the daily Case Fatality Rate

As the holiday season quickly approaches, Europe and North America find themselves in the throes of the second global wave of the pandemic with average daily numbers of cases in the hundreds of thousands.

7-day average number of cases by continent

In the United States the number of cases has rapidly increased in the past couple of weeks, but the number of deaths is still significantly below the April-May peak. There is a natural lag between the time when a case if first confirmed to the time when the patient eventually dies. From epidemiological studies we know that this lag can be of several weeks.

Case and Death counts by day in the US

One possible explanation for the lag between cases and deaths that we are currently observing is that the increase in the number of cases is simply due to an increase in test availability. If this were the case, we would expect that the fraction of positive tests would be decreasing or remaining stable. However, the fraction of positive tests is rising as well, which implies that the increase in the number of cases is not only real but also increasing faster that the testing capacity.

Percentage Of Positive Cases by day

Average Lag Time

If the rise in the number of cases is real, then we must expect a rise in the number of deaths over the coming weeks. Can we estimate what is the average lag between the two…

Hospitals brace for COVID surge, fearing shortages, burnout

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