Thread by @CathJSweeney

We're getting the Healthier Oklahoma Coalition briefing. Dr. David Kendrick, Department Chair of Medical Informatics at OU School of Community Medicine is giving a statistics update.

Dr. Kendrick shared this. Top is overall hospitalizations over time, trending down. But bottom is percent of cases hospitalized. Testing is low, so people aren't getting diagnosed until they're sick. But it does appear that Delta is more likely to cause hospitalization.

Kendrick: Hospitalizations appear more likely with the Delta variant, and the share of ICU admittance is also higher than we had during the peak this winter. "When they're being admitted, they're being admitted to a higher level of care." #okhealth

Again, hospitalization is significantly less common among those who have been vaccinated. Nearly all hospitalizations have been in people who never got the vaccine.

Dr. Mary Clarke on hospital capacity: "We're already full with run-of-the-mill, normal things... adding COVID to that stresses everything out." An emergency order would help that. She's now giving a primer on those orders.

Clarke: There are several layers of regulation — federal, state, local, etc. "A hospital cannot just randomly decide, 'I'm going to make a hospital bed tomorrow out in the hallway.' That's not legal." An emergency order loosens some of rules. It allows safe acute space expansion.

Dr. Mary Clarke: "We're all sitting here biting our nails, to an extent." There are already hospitals on divert. That means they're turning away ambulances. We in Stillwater have been on divert in the last two weeks. If the rise continues, "Everyone will be on divert."
#okhealth

Dr. Sam Ratermann, president of the Oklahoma Academy of Family Physicians and a family medicine physician with INTEGRIS Grove Hospital: Staff issues were bad last year, and nurses are leaving the field, exhausted from the first waves.

Ratermann: My hospital has fewer patients this week than last week. These COVID patients do need a higher level of care. That means they could need to be transferred. It's been taking hours — sometimes 24 — to find them somewhere. We've had to look in Kansas and Texas.

Ratermann: We have people calling 24 or 25 hospitals looking for places to transfer. Long-distance transfers pose risks. "There's a lot to be said for spiritual healing and the comfort of having family around." It also means delays in care.