FOX VALLEY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — COVID cases are on the rise, and hospital beds are filling up quickly. This all happening while other non-COVID related emergencies continue.
“The doctor did say it’s almost as bad as it was last November,” Kay Hietpas of Combined Locks said.
Friday morning, Hietpas’ 89-year-old mother tripped and fell while alone at her home.
“Thank God for Lifeline,” said Hietpas. “I got there first, and I saw how she was laying, and I’m like, ‘I am not moving you,’ so my sister came and she said, ‘No, we need to call the ambulance,’ so we both figured that she had broken her hip.”
Hietpas’ mother was rushed to St. Elizabeth’s, an Ascension hospital in Appleton, to be treated for what doctors determined to be a broken hip.
“He was looking for a bed. He said they didn’t have any beds there, so he said he’ll look at the other valley hospitals,” Hietpas explained. “He looked at Theda Clark in Appleton or Theda Clark in Neenah. Both were full, so he looked at Green Bay – all three were full. He looked at Oshkosh – both were full.”
In a statement, Ascension told FOX 11:
Ascension Wisconsin is experiencing an increase in patients with COVID-19 across our sites of care. We are concerned to see a prevalence of patients in the 30-50 age range, as opposed to the older patient demographic we saw earlier in the pandemic. We continue to regularly report all data related to our COVID-19 patients and hospital capacity to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, and we will continue to defer to them for questions on this information. While we are currently able to safely provide care, this increase can directly impact the ability of all of our local health systems to provide care to other patients who do not have COVID-19, but require hospitalization for another reason. We cannot stress enough the importance of vaccination and following masking and social distancing practices. We are optimistic that as younger age groups are vaccinated, our case numbers will start to decline. We must work together to slow the transmission of COVID-19 and care for all those in need. Everyone in our community plays a critical role in keeping us safe from this virus. The most effective way we can protect ourselves and each other right now is by getting vaccinated and encouraging our friends and family to get vaccinated.
“As you get older, you have more health needs, so I think healthcare, in general, is just working through people getting older, people being sicker than they used to be and, at the same time, we have COVID-19,” emergency physician at Bellin Health Dr. Brad Burmeister said.
Fortunately for Hietpas, one bed opened up last minute. But if it hadn’t, her mother would have to be transferred to Milwaukee for care.
“To drive two hours in an ambulance with a broken hip would not have been a good situation for an 89-year-old woman,” said Hietpas.
This has become an all-too-familiar occurrence, and not just in Wisconsin.
In Salina, Kansas, a bed could not be found for a patient, and the patient would ultimately have to be transferred to a hospital here in Oshkosh.
“We keep hearing stories about patients who are being flown, you know, potentially hundreds of miles to have an ICU bed available for them,” Burmeister said. “We know that a lot of emergency departments across other parts of the country are boarding patients in their emergency department.”
It would be over five hours from the time Hietpas’ mother arrived at the hospital to when a bed opened up, and she was finally able to get a room – something to celebrate, nowadays.
“One of the nurses came in, and I said, ‘I just heard the song Celebrate,’ and she goes, ‘Oh, every time a COVID patient is discharged, they play that over the loud speaker.”
As of Tuesday, there were 804 COVID-19 patients hospitalized. That’s over 600 more than last month.
