More hospitals forced to ration care amid delta surge

While the focus over the past few days has been the rollout of boosters, they won’t help solve the hospitalizations of the unvaccinated.

Coronavirus patients are straining hospitals across the U.S., particularly in Western states, where administrators are being forced to ration care as facilities are pushed to their breaking points by the delta variant.

Alaska this past week joined Idaho in adopting statewide crisis standards of care that provide guidance to health care providers making difficult decisions on how to allocate limited resources. Several hospitals in Montana have either activated crisis standards of care or are considering it as the state is pummeled by COVID-19.

Under the guidelines, providers can prioritize treating patients based on their chances of recovery, impacting anyone seeking emergency care, not just those with COVID-19.

Triage mode: Typically, crisis standards of care involve a scoring system to determine the patient’s survivability, sometimes including their estimated “life years” and how well their organs are working. Such guidelines do not call for factoring in vaccination status, much like emergency rooms don’t prioritize certain car crash victims based on whether a driver was drinking.

Still, the vast majority of COVID-19 patients overwhelming hospitals are unvaccinated, months after the vaccine became widely available to U.S. adults.

As of last Friday, the ICUs in Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky and Texas all exceeded 90 percent capacity. The ICUs in Alaska and Montana, meanwhile, were 84 percent and 77 percent full, respectively, according to federal data.