Inside a hospital as the coronavirus surges: Where will all the patients go? - The Washington Post

— As the coronavirus pandemic swelled around the 160-bed Mayo Clinic hospital, the day was dawning auspiciously.

Two precious beds for new patients had opened overnight.

Better yet, by midmorning, there were no patients in the Emergency Department.

to 10 a.m., seven patients arrived at the emergency room.

By 12:05 p.m., Mayo had put itself on “bypass,” sending all ambulances to the two other hospitals in town, a last-resort move rarely employed.

By late afternoon, the emergency room was stashing patients in four beds erected in the ambulance garage — the first time it had adopted that tactic — and holding others for hours as they waited for places in the overflowing hospital.

With more than 91,000 covid-19 patients in their beds, U.S.

“A bed is a gift right now,” said Jason Craig, regional chair for the Mayo Clinic Health System in northwest Wisconsin.

medicine, is supplementing its Wisconsin staff with nurses from its hospitals in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota, redeploying nurses from other parts of this hospital and hiring temporary travel nurses who sign on for short assignments.

With nearly 300 staff infected or quarantined in northwest Wisconsin, the system has turned to technological solutions and shuttling patients between hospitals as beds open.

“No one could have forecast what we’re dealing with right now, in regard to what the staff are having to do, what the patients are going through,” said Elysia Goettl, nurse manager of the hospital’s medical-surgical unit.

18 and 19, Mayo allowed The Washington Post to watch from inside the largest of its five northwest Wisconsin hospitals as it coped with the virus’s staggering consequences.

In the main 160-bed hospital here, there were 166 patients at 9 a.m.

By Thursday morning, as emergency room patients and others found their way into the hospital, there were 167.

In room 41129, on the hospital’s fourth floor, 63-year-old Mark Ahrens was beginning to recover from covid-19.

In the room next to Ahrens, 72-year-old Donna Keller said she fought diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration from covid-19 before she was finally hospitalized.

20, Ahrens to the small Mayo hospital in Bloomer, where he began rehab, and Keller to her home.

18, 38 of its 40 beds were occupied by covid-19 patients, and the hospital was seeking staff so it could fill the last two.

In normal times, Mayo is nearly this full, said Richard A.

On Ahrens’s floor, nurses attend to covid-19 patients at least once an hour, and each nurse typically is responsible for at least three patients.

Sara Annis, who supervises the medical-surgical nurses, works long hours at the hospital while her husband puts in 60 to 80 hours a week trying to keep the couple’s brewpub alive.

“It’s a huge, huge struggle just to try to balance work and family life right now,” she said.

They are provided hospital equipment, full-time monitoring from a central control room and visits by paramedics, nurses or nurse practitioners.

Mayo is now caring for five people at home, including covid-19 patient Rita Huebner.

A Mayo paramedic visited Huebner’s small apartment before she arrived, making room for the hospital equipment she would need.

Huebner, 83, said she may have to rehab in a nursing home but for now accepts recuperating at home

Patients trade the security of having trained caregivers at their bedside for the advantages of staying in their own beds, at times with family around them, said Margaret Paulson, chief clinical officer for the at-home program

“We need hope right now,” Craig said