Crunch time looms for intensive care beds as US faces dark pandemic winter

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The availability of intensive care beds is under pressure at hospitals across America as the coronavirus spread accelerates in an increasingly dark and dangerous phase of the pandemic.

As hospitals report shortages of healthcare staff and bed capacity, analyses of new data released by the federal government showed that intensive care unit (ICU) beds across the country are nearing capacity.

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Field hospitals are being set up to take the overflow of patients from hospitals in states as varied as sprawling giant Texas and tiny Rhode Island as the healthcare system in the US creaks under the strain of what the World Health Organization has called the “punishing” effects of the pandemic.

Donald Trump refrains from addressing the surging infections and growing daily death toll that are taking the US towards its worst peak since the early surge in the spring, while daily tweeting multiple times to escalate his futile but damaging campaign to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory.

About 2,200 Americans are now dying each day on average and about a million new cases are being recorded every week, whereas it took three months for the US to reach its first million cases when coronavirus hit in early 2020.

The availability of ICU beds has shrunk to single digits in some areas, or indeed to zero in Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to the latest statistics.

More than a third of Americans live in areas where hospitals are running critically short of intensive care beds, an analysis of federal data released on Monday by the New York Times showed in its report on Wednesday, in what has been the deadliest week of the pandemic so far in the US.

One in 10 Americans – especially across the midwest, south and south-west – lives in an area where intensive care beds are either full, or available at lower than 5% of capacity, the outlet reported.

“There’s only so much our frontline care can offer, particularly when you get to these really rural counties which are being hit hard by the pandemic right now,” Beth Blauer, director of the Centers for Civic Impact at Johns Hopkins University, told the Times.

Acute increases in Covid-19 patients can overwhelm smaller hospitals, she added. “This disease progresses very quickly and can get very ugly very fast. When you don’t have that capacity, that means people will die.”

The new data released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Monday gave the most details yet on how Covid-19 is causing strain on hospitals nationwide.

It offers nationwide information on hospital capacity and bed use at a hospital-by-hospital level, the first time the federal agency has released the Covid-19 hospital data it collects at the facility level, according to this report from NPR. Previously, HHS released data aggregated at the state level only.

“The new data paints the picture of how a specific hospital is experiencing the pandemic,” Pinar Karaca-Mandic, a professor at the University of Minnesota who worked with HHS to vet the data before it was published, through her work with the Covid-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, told NPR.

Patients at one field hospital in Rhode Island described the mainstream hospital as clogged with coronavirus patients being treated in hallways and having to wait for rooms, with one describing the situation to the Providence Journal as like a scene from a horror movie.

Field hospitals are taking patients in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, and such facilities are multiplying and will probably expand further in parts of Texas, where morgues have been overflowing in cities such as El Paso.

Some hospitals in Texas are above 90% full during this autumn-winter surge in coronavirus cases, the data shows.

And some states, such as Pennsylvania and New Mexico, are talking about “rationing” care as cases in the US crossed the 15m threshold on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, economic relief and a the prospect of US approval for a vaccine drew nearer to reality on Wednesday.

The US House of Representatives was set to vote on Wednesday afternoon on a one-week stopgap funding bill that will buy more time to reach a deal on Covid-19 relief, with a separate aid package of more than $900bn on the table.

The Democratic US senator Joe Manchin said he expected Democrats and Republicans to work out most of the funding bill details on Wednesday.

“You’re going to see 90% of the bill today,” Manchin told CNN.

But the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told reporters: “We’re still looking for a way forward.”