MIDLAND, Texas — Midland Memorial Hospital is seeing more and more COVID-19 patients.
In one week they went from having three hospitalized patients to 20. Six of them are in the Critical Care Unit.
“From 3 to 20 in a week is a pretty alarming growth rate,” Russell Meyers, Midland Health CEO, said.
Right now, the CCU is at 83% capacity, but the emergency room continues to see a low number of patients.
Most of the COVID-19 patients the hospital has seen have been under the age of 60.
“A majority of those seeking care are younger, but they’re not as likely to be in critical care,” Meyers said.
The CCU has 24 beds and, right now, six of those beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients.
Meyers says that if need be, the hospital has a plan that would allow 36 more beds to be added to the CCU.
The only problem with adding more beds: there isn't enough staff to go around.
“That would be very very difficult," Meyers said. "We don’t have enough respiratory therapists or CCU nurses to suddenly expand to 60 beds."
The hospital says that reaching over 80% capacity in CCU is common.
What's not common is having six patients with a highly contagious virus that they anticipate will spread more throughout the community in the upcoming weeks.
Another thing to note, due to the spike in cases, the hospital is once again limiting their visitor policy.
The policy will go into effect starting at 5 a.m. on June 26.
Some exceptions include:
• Labor and delivery patients can have one support person and a doula
• Pediatric patients can have one guardian or parent
• Government personnel
• Family members of patients at the end of their life