There are 700 hospital beds at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, but there are more than 760 patients being treated currently according to hospital leadership. Vice-Chancellor Dr. LouAnn Woodward says the hospital is dealing with a large number of hospitalizations from non-COVID related illness, but coronavirus patients are compounding the burden and often require longer hospital stays. Dr. Woodward says “The resources are finite. It gets to a point where we have to say ‘We don’t have another place to put another patient safely. We can’t do it.’ And it gets to a point where we have to say ‘We don’t have the nursing staff, we don’t have it, we can’t do it.”
The number of people hospitalized in Mississippi is at an all-time high. Dr. Alan Jones says if this trend continues, the holiday season could cause coronavirus transmission to grow, which eventually means more hospitalizations. “So it appears as though we’re at least on either the upslope or at the top at what is a higher caseload than we saw before. In terms of how it’s impacting the hospital resources, it just has shifted some,” says Dr. Jones. “In the first wave it was more ICU intensive, now it’s more medical surge intensive. But the resources are still the resources and they’re still slim.”
Doctors are asking residents to stay vigilant, wear masks and avoid all social events.
