Available hospital beds in Missouri dwindle daily
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Missouri hospitals are seeing a steady increase in occupancy due to the spread of new COVID variants. Only 19% of inpatient hospital beds are available in Missouri, according to data from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
However, not all the patients filling up hospitals are coming in with COVID. In fact, several Cole County doctors said they're seeing a lot more patients coming in with "routine" issues.
Dr. Randall Haight with Capital Regional Medical Center said many people were scared to come in earlier in the year and last year because they feared they might catch COVID.
"They're not as afraid of COVID because they may have been vaccinated, so they're coming in appropriately when they're having heart attacks or strokes or having different things," Haight said.
Dr. Lenora Adams with St. Mary's said the hospital has hired additional staff to offset the increased demand.
"St Mary's also has a lot of patients presenting for care," Adams said. "Due to the increase in demand for health care that we saw, we did add on more than two dozen staff."
Data from the state's COVID-19 dashboard shows hospitals are currently only 46 ICU patients away from Missouri's peak on December 22, 2020. At the peak, there were 685 ICU patients with COVID, the latest numbers show there are 639 ICU patients with COVID.
On Wednesday, ABC 17 reported 206 Missouri patients are on ventilators; the latest data as of Thursday morning shows that number has increased to 327.
The number of COVID patients in the hospital has been steadily increasing each month since April, which was the lowest number of cases since the start of the pandemic. On May 2 there were 698 COVID patients in Missouri hospitals, one month later there were 722. Another month later, on July 2, there were 962. This month, August 2, the DHSS reported 2,092 COVID patients in Missouri hospitals.
The increase in cases may be attributed to the highly contagious delta variant. The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the delta variant makes up 52% of COVID cases in Missouri, but combines with the other delta mutations, it makes up over 90% of Missouri's COVID cases.
Vaccines have proven to prevent serious illness or death when it comes to all variants of COVID. For information on where to get a free COVID-19 vaccine, check with your local health department or here.
