Washington Asks Feds For Help Staffing Struggling Hospitals

OLYMPIA, WA — Gov. Jay Inslee is asking the federal government for help staffing Washington's hospitals as they struggle to stay afloat after weeks of record-high hospitalization rates.

In a letter to federal COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients, Inslee wrote that Washington's health care system was currently "at or beyond capacity" and that the state needs outside help to handle the continuing influx of new COVID patients.

"Once the Delta variant hit Washington state, COVID-19 hospitalizations skyrocketed," Inslee said. "From mid-July to late August, we saw hospitalizations double about every two weeks. The hospitals have surged to increase staffed beds and stretch staff and have canceled most non-urgent procedures, but are still over capacity across the state."

Inslee said that, in the past, the Washington State Department of Health had requested the assistance of 1,200 clinical and non-clinical staff through FEMA, but that further assistance will be "of significant value in Washington" as the state fights to crest the current, fifth wave of infections driven by the delta variant.

As the governor notes, some states are seeing a decline in new COVID-19 cases, but that hasn't yet been the case for the Evergreen State. And while hospitalizations were down this week in Washington, the news is not all good.

At the Washington State Hospital Association's weekly briefing Monday, WSHA President and CEO Cassie Sauer confirmed that hospitalizations had declined for the first time in weeks — from about 1,673 hospitalized COVID-19 patients last Monday, to 1504 current COVID hospitalizations.

"There are two reasons we think this is happening," Sauer said. "One is we really think Washingtonians are taking this very seriously, we've seen an increase in the vaccination rates, the governor's order on masking, some of the county actions like the vaccine verification that's happening in a number of counties."

However, Sauer says the other reason hospitalizations dipped, is because the death rate rose.

"That is a reason, when you've got fewer people in the hospital, it is because some have died," Sauer said. "There is a number of counties that are either ordering additional morgue capacity through refrigerated trucks, or working with their morgues to figure out how to increase capacity."

260 patients in Washington are currently on ventilators battling life-threatening COVID-19 infections. That's the same number of ventilated patients as reported a week ago, though as Sauer confirms, they are not all the same patients: some have died, and others have filled their place.

30 died over the 24 hours leading up to Monday's briefing.

Ultimately, the governor and the WSHA are hoping the extra staffing will help avoid activating "crisis standards of care," which would mean rationing health care for the patients who are most likely to survive. While Washington's health care system has not hit that point yet, some of its hospitals have had to cancel critical treatment for patients not suffering from COVID-19.

To see what could happen if Washington took a turn for the worse, you only need to look east. In Idaho (and in parts of Alaska and Montana), crisis standards of care have been enacted. Now, hospitals there are overflowing, and some patients are even crossing the border into Washington, further crowding our already-strained hospitals.

"Caring for people who are coming across the border is causing people in Washington to not get the care that they need," Sauer said.

That's just one more reason the state and health care providers continue to urge the unvaccinated to consider taking their shots. The overwhelming majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to be among unvaccinated patients, while the vaccinated people who require care tend to have compromised immunity.

"COVID is still a deadly disease, and the best way for that not to be a deadly disease is to be vaccinated," Sauer said.

As of the latest update to the Washington State Department of Health's COVID-19 data dashboard, 73 percent of the state's vaccine-eligible population has had at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and 66.2 percent are fully vaccinated.