The number of covid-19 patients at Northwest Arkansas hospitals has dropped slightly over the past month, but those admitted more often require intensive care or use of ventilators.
Hospital staffers expect more new patients as a result of Labor Day weekend and Razorback football games.
The workload never really abated over the past month or so, said Eric Pianalto, president of Mercy Hospital Northwest Arkansas in Rogers. The intense care required for patients getting sicker now compared with earlier in the pandemic offsets the lower number of patients admitted, he said.
The delta variant is affecting younger, healthier people more acutely than the previous strain did, Pianalto said. Hospital staffs are having to hook people in their 20s, 30s or 40s to ventilators. The chances of recovering after being on a ventilator are low, he said.
Those patients all have a common trait: they aren’t vaccinated, Pianalto said.
“It’s a pretty indiscriminate variant. It doesn’t really matter whether you have other health conditions or not,” he said.
Hospital staffers aren’t seeing similarly younger, healthier people who did get vaccinated put in intensive care or on ventilators, Pianalto said.
As of Friday, nearly 91% of 120 covid-19 patients in Northwest Arkansas hospitals were unvaccinated. The few vaccinated people who end up dying, in intensive care or hooked up to a ventilator are elderly or had some other debilitating health condition, he said.
The all-time high for covid hospitalizations in Benton and Washington counties was 173 on Aug. 11, according to a news release from Northwest Arkansas Health Care Providers. The number has slowly declined since then.
However, Wednesday marked an all-time high of 140 occupied intensive care unit beds for covid and non-covid patients. On Friday, there were 119 ICU beds in use.
Ventilator use has stayed consistent. The all-time high was 85 on Aug. 12. There were 71 patients on ventilators Friday.
Kim Miller, region president for Baptist Health in Fort Smith and Van Buren, said the hospitals’ critical care census has remained fairly consistent over the past two weeks. There were 71 covid patients at the two hospitals Friday. At the Fort Smith location, 31 were in critical care and 19 were on ventilators.
Historically, the state and region have seen a rise in cases within about two weeks after a holiday, Pianalto said. Razorback football games can also serve as holiday-type events, he said.
Labor Day and the first Arkansas home football game of the season both happened last weekend. Benton and Washington counties led the state in new cases Thursday, with 210 and 204, respectively. On Friday, Benton County was second in new cases at 142 and Washington County was third with 138.
The Northwest Arkansas Council is trying to counter the effect of gatherings on the spread of covid-19 by setting up vaccination clinics. The council at one point routinely held mass clinics at centralized locations in Fayetteville and Lowell, but has switched its strategy to spreading out where the people are, said Ryan Cork with the council’s Health Care Transformation Division.
Clinics have popped up at football games, farmers markets, concerts, neighborhoods and community events.
“We’ve seen by being in more spaces we’re able to reach more patients who wouldn’t have normally been able to come out to a covid shot clinic, either because of lack of transportation or a work schedule that didn’t allow for it,” he said.
Marti Sharkey, Fayetteville’s public health officer, told the city’s Board of Health on Wednesday that vaccination rates are going up about a percentage point weekly in the city.
Over the weekend, Washington County saw 60% of its 12-and-older population being at least partially immunized. Vaccinations had slowed before a recent surge in cases from the delta variant, she said.
As of Friday, nearly 50% of the 200,760 residents in Washington County were fully vaccinated, and about 49% of the 231,247 Benton County residents were fully vaccinated. About 11% in Washington County were partially immunized with nearly 10% in Benton County partially immunized.
Nearly 42% of the 160,871 people 12 and older in Sebastian and Crawford counties were fully vaccinated. About 9% of the 107,538 Sebastian County residents were partially immunized and 8% of the 53,333 Crawford County residents were partially immunized.
The council is prepared to work with private companies to comply with President Joe Biden’s vaccinations mandate. Biden announced Thursday that all businesses with more than 100 employees must require their workers to be immunized or take weekly covid tests.