Biggest COVID surge to date: Omicron patients fill Dallas-Fort Worth hospitals
The highly infectious omicron variant of the coronavirus is likely to fill Dallas-Fort Worth hospitals to capacity, bringing a wave of patients to hospitals already struggling with an exhausted workforce that itself is not immune to the new variant.
Hospitalizations are expected to continue rising in the coming weeks, according to projections from the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. It’s not clear whether hospitalizations will surpass the highs of the January 2021 surge and the September 2021 surge, said Anass Bouchnita, the lead author of the consortium’s report on omicron. But so far, Bouchnita said, a record seems likely.
The 3,424 COVID-positive patients in DFW hospitals are occupying 22.5% of all staffed hospital beds. The increase in COVID patients has pushed many hospitals at or near capacity, with potentially thousands of more COVID patients still needing care in the coming weeks.
The new variant “has the potential to cause the most severe COVID-19 healthcare surges to date,” Bouchnita and his colleagues wrote in their analysis.
Tarrant County hospitals are already almost fully occupied, according to data from Tarrant County Public Health. About 92% of beds in county hospitals were occupied as of Monday, with 97% of adult intensive care units occupied. And multiple hospitals have reported completely full intensive care units to the federal government as of Jan. 6.
“If I have to speculate, I think that the hospital admissions will also exceed the prior max in Texas,” Bouchnita said.
The increased infectiousness of the omicron variant creates a two-fold problem for hospitals: It is infecting more people, and causing a large volume of people to need care. But it is also infecting more health care workers, meaning that hospital employees who test positive have to isolate. When employees test positive, it puts one more strain on hospitals when resources are already stretched thin, said Stephen Love, the president and CEO of the DFW Hospital Council.
“What we’re concerned with as we look at the projections, especially over the next two to three weeks, is we see the case count projected to increase and hospitalizations to increase,” Love said. “Are we going to have the staff needed to really cover the number of cases that we’ll have?”
At JPS Health Network, 81 employees were out of work because of COVID, spokesperson Diana Brodeur said. The state is dispatching 49 traveling health care workers to assist the county hospital during this surge, Brodeur said.
The surge is different from previous spikes in important ways, both Love and Bouchnita said, most notably because omicron less frequently causes serious illness and death compared to the delta variant. But because omicron is more infectious, it is sending as many people to the hospital as delta did, and is likely to continue sending even more.
“We are in the middle of the biggest surge to date,” Bouchnita said.
The fact that omicron is less mild compared to delta, he added, might be causing people to underestimate the fact that a milder coronavirus is still a threat that can cause disease and death, particularly among the unvaccinated.
This story was originally published January 12, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
