EDITORIAL: Misleading COVID Information Regarding Colorado Hospitals?

But now the [ambulance] team is being called to move patients more frequently, and greater distances, because the hospital beds in the relatively close cities of Montrose and Grand Junction are filled with covid-19 patients. The team is regularly required to drive patients to Denver, which is around three hours and 40 minutes from Gunnison…

— from an article by reporter By Helen Santoro, “As Hospitals Fill Up, Paramedics Spend More Time Moving Patients, Less on Emergencies”, on Kaiser Health News (KHN), December 17, 2021.

You can’t always believe what you read in the news.

We understand that everyone exaggerates, on occasion. It’s human nature, to try and sell our perpespective by making a situation sound worse (or better) than the facts suggest. An exaggeration may be outrageous and obvious… but often, it’s subtle and barely noticeable.

One such subtle exaggeration may have appeared in Ms. Santoro’s recent article in the Kaiser Health News, when she stated that the hospital beds in Grand Junction and Montrose, Colorado, are “filled with covid-19 patients.”

If indeed the hospital beds in Grand Junction and Montrose are “filled with covid-19 patients” — that puts them in a completely different category from the rest of Colorado, where, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), only 16% of the hospital beds in the state are occupied with confirmed or “suspected” COVID patients. (Data from Saturday, December 18.)

A report by CBS News states that 25% of hospitalized “COVID patients” are actually being treated for a different condition, but just happen to test positive for COVID.

Colorado hospital beds might indeed be “filled”… but not necessarily with COVID cases. Nor is the “number of licensed beds” the entire story.

Ms. Santoro’s KHN article was not the only recent story that may contain possibly misleading information about the COVID crisis in Colorado.  Here’s an excerpt from another KHN article by Colorado Public Radio reporter John Daley, posted on December 15:

Burch has battled chronic osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis and has had two major intestinal surgeries. One specialist he was seeing left her practice last year. Another wouldn’t accept his insurance. Then, Nov. 1, he started experiencing major stomach pain.

“When we talk terrible problems, I can’t leave the house,” he said. He hasn’t eaten anything substantial in three weeks, he added.

Burch had to wait that long to be seen by a primary care doctor. He said the doctor told him, “‘If things were different, I would tell you to go to the hospital and be diagnosed, have some tests run and see what’s going on with you.’ But he says, ‘As of today, Delta County hospital is clear full. There are no beds available.’”

The covid variant ‘delta’ has overwhelmed the Colorado county of the same name. Hospitals on the Western Slope have been slammed for weeks, and the statewide picture is similarly grim. As of Monday, the state’s coronavirus website reported 1,294 patients hospitalized with covid-19. Half of the state’s hospitals said they anticipated a staffing shortage in mid-December; more than a third of them anticipated bed shortages in their intensive care units at the same time.

As the November surge in cases continues a downward trend in Colorado, we read this claim that 1,294 patients are “hospitalized with covid-19”. What we didn’t read in Mr. Daley’s article is that Colorado has about 12,558 licensed hospital beds.

Ten times a many beds as COVID patients.

But we also hear, from Mr. Daly, about “a staffing shortage in mid-December…”

As it turns out, in Colorado and elsewhere, the “number of available beds” has less to do with the actual “number of licensed beds” and more to do with the “shortage of nurses needed to care for the people in those beds”.

An article by reporter Shaun Boyd, posted by CBS News last month, includes a story about Stevie Silvers, the lead nurse in the surgical unit at UCHealth’s Poudre Valley Hospital, who was fired from her job. According to the story, Ms. Silvers — who was named nurse of the year in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic — had filed a religious exemption to the COVID vaccine… so she was required by her employer to get a COVID test every 72 hours.

She was having a bad reaction to the nasal swap tests and had requested a saliva test instead. Rather than accommodate her request, the hospital fired her. Mr. Boyd’s article quotes Ms. Silvers:

“At the height of such a deadly disease and pandemic, when it’s so important to have all hands on deck, how can they deem anyone disposable right now?”

UCHealth’s Poudre Valley Hospital, where Silvers was the charge nurse in the surgical unit, has a staffing shortage so severe that federal health workers have been called in.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment says a surge in COVID cases is straining hospitals. Silvers says the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

“We do have a population that includes our COVID patients that we wouldn’t have had two years ago, but it doesn’t speak to why our hospitals are full the way they are.”

Mr. Boyd also quotes Colleen Casper, head of the Colorado Nurses Association:

“We have a very big disconnect between the accuracy of what’s reported and the decisions that are being made. I get calls every day from nurses in tears, describing what patients are experiencing, and they’re helpless to do anything because there’s simply not enough of them.”

Nurse Stevie Silvers agrees with that analysis of hospital policies in Colorado.

…“It’s not an issue of having the beds, it’s an issue of not having the staff, and being willing to force out staff good enough and willing to work through a pandemic.”

Bill Hudson

Bill Hudson

Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.