KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Hospital leaders around the Kansas City region say they're seeing a downward trend in COVID-19 cases.
It's good news, but hospitals still face a variety of challenges and a strain on their systems.
Chief medical officers from hospitals around the Kansas City area joined a virtual news conference Wednesday morning to discuss the current state of the pandemic.
"Folks, here's the story, we are COVID better, we are most certainly not COVID good, and we are clearly not COVID free," Dr. Steve Stites, the chief medical officer at the University of Kansas Health System, said.
While doctors say they are seeing a decrease in new admissions for COVID-19, they say hospitalizations are still at record highs.
"We're still not really to the situation where we can take patients in from other hospitals who need our help on a regular, reliable basis without some sort of a time delay," Stites said.
Doctors said their intensive care units remain close to capacity for many hospitals.
"Patients are waiting ten plus hours for transport and that's opposed to what we usually see," Dr. Richard Watson, the co-founder of Motient, said. "If it were normal capacity, it would be one to two hours, with time critical diseases being less than an hour to move patients out."
While the numbers are going down, the impact of the strain on health care systems will be felt for a long time, specifically with staffing shortages.
"We're still having employees out with COVID, yesterday we had 48 out with COVID, that's a nice downward trend but we're still continuing to see staffing shortages," Dr. Lisa Hays, the chief medical officer of AdventHealth Shawnee Mission, said. "37 of those 48 were in a clinical setting, so people not able to be at the bedside and care for patients."
Doctors say ICU capacity is particularly strained due to longer length of stay among patients with COVID, which average up to three times longer than other types of patients.
"I think that's sort of the take home message, is how long it takes to recover from this illness, it can be a very long hospitalization and then weeks and months, if not years of complete recovery," Dr. Heather Harris, the medical director of HaysMed, said.
Doctors said the majority of deaths from COVID-19 continue to be those who are unvaccinated. They're asking community members to continue doing their part to fight to end the pandemic and to show kindness to health care workers.
Wednesday's conference ended with a message from Casey Pickering, a nurse manager at the University of Kansas Health System.
"Just don't forget about us, because we're still here and I think it feels often like people have forgotten that we're still here," Pickering said.
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