Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2022 | 2 a.m.
At University Medical Center in Las Vegas, an average of 200 employees are calling out sick each day with COVID-19, hospital spokesman Scott Kerbs said.
UMC, which has about 4,000 employees, isn’t the only Nevada hospital feeling the crunch.
The Nevada Hospital Association said Monday that Clark County hospitals were still at “crisis” staffing levels, a designation the association issued last week for five of the state’s 17 counties.
That means staffing is limited enough to affect patient care and further prioritize critical injuries and illness — or, as the hospital association put it, “hospitals are stretched thin and patients who want testing only, or who have minor or non-threatening ailments to life, limb, sight, etc. can anticipate excessive wait times, difficulty being transferred to a specific hospital, or being admitted from the emergency department, and longer drop-times for ambulances.”
A spokesperson for Dignity Health, operators of St. Rose Dominican Hospitals, said the staffing situation is “urgent.” He declined to give specifics, but did detail changes being implemented to more quickly bring staff who test positive back to work.
The chain, in following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, is letting vaccinated and boosted workers who are asymptomatic or with improving mild symptoms stay on the job.
A company statement pointed to CDC guidelines and attributed the move to “the spread and impact of the COVID-19 omicron variant in southern Nevada, and in anticipation of a continued increase.”
“We are doing everything we can to ensure our employees can safely return to work while protecting our patients and staff from the transmissibility of COVID-19,” St. Rose spokesman Gordon Absher said in an email Monday. “The safety of our staff and patients is always our top priority; and we have tremendous gratitude for our dedicated care teams who have worked tirelessly to take care of our communities throughout the pandemic.”
Absher said that St. Rose hospitals are seeing a steady increase of coronavirus patients, and although the sick are less likely to need intensive care than in previous waves, “we are seeing a very high number of patients that continues to increase.”
HCA — which operates Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, Southern Hills Hospital and MountainView Hospital — didn’t respond to a request on staffing. The group last week told the Review-Journal it had 300 workers out sick on Thursday.
Many hospitals around the U.S. are swamped with cases and severely short-staffed because so many employees are out with COVID-19. Officials blame the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant, which has the number of new cases of COVID-19 exploding nationally but appears to be causing milder illness than the delta variant.
The Nevada Hospital Association last week declared a staffing crisis in southern Nevada and some rural areas, citing rising hospitalization numbers and staffing shortages. Officials issued a plea for people not to crowd emergency rooms in search of coronavirus tests.
State health officials on Monday reported 1,356 people hospitalized with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 in Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County.
Test positivity, a key measure of the number of people tested and found to have COVID-19, has skyrocketed in recent weeks in the Las Vegas area — to nearly 29% on Monday.
The figure was 5.9% on Nov. 1, after a low of 3.2% last June and a previous peak of 20.4% about a year ago. The World Health Organization goal is 5% or below to relax mitigation measures.
Demand for COVID-19 tests has created long lines at a relocated drive-through testing center set up at Sam Boyd Stadium southeast of downtown Las Vegas, and the Southern Nevada Health District has announced that test centers will open in coming days at two shuttered casinos — Texas Station in North Las Vegas and the Fiesta Henderson.
Case numbers are climbing sharply in Nevada, according to state health data, but few new coronavirus deaths have been reported. The number of deaths statewide is 8,528 since the pandemic began in March 2020.
Clark County on Monday reported nearly 7,900 new COVID-19 cases during the weekend, pushing the county’s overall case total past 400,000. The Las Vegas area has had about three-fourths of the more than 525,000 coronavirus cases confirmed statewide.
Officials continue to stress to residents the importance of getting vaccinated.
“It’s important to note that UMC is the only hospital in our state to follow through on mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for staff,” Krebs said. “As a result, we have an incredibly high vaccination rate, in addition to the state’s most comprehensive COVID-19 prevention protocols. Without these important safeguards in place, the situation could have been significantly worse.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
