More than 100,000 people are currently in hospitals across the U.S. sick with Covid-19, as the pandemic pushes doctors, nurses and other health workers to their limits.
The current number of hospitalized patients underscores the scope and severity of the current phase of the U.S. outbreak. Never before had the number of hospitalized Covid patients surpassed 60,000, according to data compiled by the Covid Tracking Project, which is run by journalists at The Atlantic.
In fact, Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief health care officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said in a phone interview with CNBC that she doesn’t recall any disease sickening so many Americans all at once ever before.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen this number. We certainly never saw this number with HIV or any of the other new diseases that we’ve had,” Orlowksi said. “It’s an astonishing, astonishing number and the shame of it is it’s a number that we could have impacted and we didn’t.”
Earlier this week, Orlowski’s organization, the AAMC, announced that it is encouraging all health systems to prepare to deploy “Crisis Standards of Care,” which is typically used in severe situations such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
Orlowski explained that crisis care essentially means the rationing of care in hospitals. The goal is “to provide the best care possible to the largest number of people with the resources available,” AAMC said. But it also means difficult decisions will be made about whom to use scarce resources on, Orlowski added.
Hospitals in some parts of the country are already at the point of crisis care, Orlowski said, such as El Paso, Texas, parts of Utah, North Dakota and parts of Nebraska. She added that “most hospitals are going to be there in the next two weeks” if current trends persist or get worse, owing to a surge driven by Thanksgiving travel and gatherings.