Despite state’s COVID-19 surge, UK says another field hospital isn’t needed.
Months after the University of Kentucky deconstructed a $7 million unused field hospital, Kentucky’s largest health care system is again preparing for an “expected increase” in COVID-19 patients, but a separate overflow facility likely won’t be necessary, officials said on Monday.
UKHealthCare is currently treating about 50 novel coronavirus patients, Colleen Swartz, UKHealthCare vice president for hospital operations said in a virtual news conference Monday. The hospital system in the last two weeks has seen an increase in its coronavirus patient population, but not dramatically.
“We’ve been running consistently 25-30 inpatients with COVID-19, and now we’re in the 45-50 range,” Swartz said.
Current models Swartz and Dr. Mark Newman, UK’s vice president for health affairs, say they’re using don’t require any capacity outside of UKHealthCare’s current footprint. That means, at this point, a field hospital isn’t necessary. UK’s built-in surge capacity at Albert B. Chandler Hospital, where staff can fit an additional 300 patients, is expected to be adequate, they said.
“We don’t have plans for another field hospital,” Swartz said. Newman said the models “are peaking much lower, within the range of [hospital] capacity” currently available across the state. “We’re feeling pretty good,” Newman said.
In April, when Kentucky’s initial COVID-19 infection curve was trending upward for the first time, UK scrambled to build a 400-bed field hospital near Kroger Field to absorb a projected overflow in hospital patients. The worst projections showed UK getting an influx of up to 1,200 patients, Swartz recalled Monday.
But those patients never came, largely because Kentucky, by way of shutting down its economy for several weeks through a series of executive orders, avoided an initial spike. In May, the field hospital was torn down, never having been used.
Now, five months later, Kentucky is facing its most dramatic case surge. Last week brought another record-setting number of new infections — 9,335 — compared with the second-highest weekly total earlier this month of 7,675; virus-related hospitalizations are on the incline, as are deaths. Gov. Andy Beshear, who is credited with helping Kentucky avoid a spike in cases early on, plans to issue “new recommendations” Monday afternoon for the 48 counties that are in the “red zone,” where community spread is considered “critical.”
Statewide, coronavirus-related hospitalizations, like new cases, continue to rise week over week, but hospitals are getting better at treating those patients, Newman and Swartz said. Additionally, while there are more cases, more younger, asymptomatic people are testing positive — a group that often doesn’t get sick enough to be hospitalized. Since July, the demographic in Kentucky with greatest growth of new infections has been kids and teenagers between ages 10 and 19.
So much of Kentucky’s ability to keep new infections at bay comes down to the individual willingness to do what works, Swartz said. It “depends on the community’s response to these increases. If every person takes a more active responsibility in their own mask-wearing, social distancing and hand-washing, we can continue to flatten that curve like we did before,” she said.
