What’s the COVID situation in Miami and why are Florida hospitals full of patients?
Hospitals are filling up with patients across the country, including in Florida, where about 80% of hospital beds are in use, though COVID-19 isn’t making up the majority of hospitalizations in the state, federal data shows.
While Florida has seen a steady increase in COVID-19 cases since late November, hospital officials say it isn’t like last year’s winter surge, when people packed test sites and COVID cases fueled by the more contagious omicron variant challenged an already strained healthcare system.
Of the 43,101 inpatient beds being used in Florida, 3,112, or about 6% of the beds are being used for COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, as of Thursday. Of the 4,895 ICU beds in use, about 5% are being used for COVID-19.
And while South Florida hospitals say they’re seeing more people with COVID compared to several weeks ago, they’re not overwhelmed. And not every patient admitted to the hospital is because of COVID.
“We’ve not been surprised by the volumes we’re seeing. ... Typically, a couple of weeks after holidays, where families tend to gather indoors, we tend to see an increase in infections, respiratory infections in particular. Keeping in line with that, we might expect to see an increase in COVID infections in the coming weeks,” said Dr. Hany Atallah, the chief medical officer for Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
What is the COVID situation like in Florida?
At Jackson Health, Miami-Dade’s public hospital system, there were 102 patients admitted for something else and then were diagnosed with COVID. Another 45 were hospitalized because of the disease, Atallah said.
At Baptist Health of South Florida, there were 171 patients with COVID-19 across its 12 hospitals compared to last year, when the hospital system had 652 patients hospitalized with COVID-19.
“While hospitals across our system are busy, which is common during this time of year, we do have sufficient capacity in our ICUs across the system to care for patients,” Baptist Health said in a statement.
Memorial Healthcare System, the public hospital network for southern Broward County, is also not seeing an influx of COVID patients at this time, according to Kerting Baldwin, the hospital’s administrative director of corporate communications.
“We expect to see this up and down pattern, and perhaps it will be seasonal, but for now is nowhere near where we were last January when Memorial Healthcare System was managing more than 700 hospitalized COVID-19 patients,” Baldwin said. “Today, we have approximately 130 patients hospitalized with COVID-19.”
More COVID cases likely in Florida
Mary Jo Trepka, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor at Florida International University, expects Florida will see more COVID cases in the coming weeks and is encouraging people to get the bivalent COVID booster, if they haven’t already, especially since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers Miami-Dade to have a high COVD risk level.
The agency is recommending people wear a high-quality mask and for those at high risk of getting seriously ill to consider avoiding non-essential indoor activities in public. Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties are under a medium risk level.
Two recent CDC studies found that the bivalent boosters are more effective at reducing risk of hospitalization compared to the boosters of the original vaccine.
And despite being in the midst of flu season, with influenza-like illnesses still circulating in high amounts across much of the United States, South Florida hospitals say they’ve seen fairly low flu activity so far. Nicklaus Children’s Hospital near Coral Gables has seen an uptick in COVID and Respiratory Syncytial Virus, or RSV, a common childhood virus that strained some pediatric hospitals in the country in 2022. The children’s hospital hasn’t seen much flu, though health experts caution that flu season is still underway. Trepka is encouraging people to get the flu shot this year.
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“We’re always going to plan for the worst and hope for the best,” said Atallah. “We still have capacity to be able to take care of all the citizens of the community that we need to take care of.”
This doesn’t mean Florida hospitals are back to pre-COVID times. They’re still very much feeling the effects of COVID.
Why are Florida’s hospital beds filling up?
Florida hospitals, on average, had about 77% of their beds occupied over the course of 2022 due to a variety of challenges, said Mary Mayhew, president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association.
While hospitals are in full-scale operations again, caring for people with and without COVID, offering elective and non-elective surgeries, hospital systems across the country are also still grappling with a staffing shortage, Mayhew said.
This means hospitals might have a lot of beds available, but not enough workers to staff them, reducing how many patients can be cared for at a time, she said. Another problem has to do with timely discharging patients who no longer need hospital care.
A recent survey conducted by the association found that patients are waiting days, weeks and months to be discharged from Florida hospitals, a problem that was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 34,000 patients in Florida were hospitalized up to 10 days longer than necessary and more than 3,000 patients stayed in the hospital even longer, according to the association.
Mayhew said many of these problems stem from the patient needing to be discharged to another facility, such as nursing homes, which are also grappling with staffing shortages. Besides sick patients, COVID also brought another challenge to hospitals: “It has kind of up-ended the seasonality of other infectious illnesses,” Mayhew said.
South Florida doctors have previously told the Herald that it’s possible COVID-19 precautions families took during the pandemic, like wearing masks and staying home more, likely reduced young children’s exposure to common viruses. And now that almost everyone is back to their pre-pandemic ways, with kids in school, families gathering and traveling, kids are getting sick again.
“So we may now be seeing unusual bumps during unusual times of the year. Now, not all of that may require hospitalizations but it is less predictable right now because we’re still dealing with the aftermath of not just COVID but all of the mitigation strategies that may have affected other health care utilization,” Mayhew said.
“The good news is that hospitals are extremely well prepared, given their experience now, with COVID. We are so far ahead of where we were in the early months of 2020 when we were without PPE, without the testing equipment, without some of the treatments, so things have vastly improved. The challenge, though continues to be where treatments may be necessary. The strain keeps changing. And so hospitals will continue to respond as they have and they are prepared in terms of capacity.”
This story was originally published January 6, 2023 at 12:00 AM.
