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Local COVID Report: Younger Patients Sicker, Quicker

August 6, 2021

With the Delta virus accounting for more than 98% of all COVID cases in Nebraska, Community Hospital leadership says they are seeing patients testing positive for COVID who are mainly unvaccinated, younger, and become sicker, quicker.

“We are seeing more and more inpatients with COVID again,” said Troy Bruntz, Community Hospital President & CEO. “They are younger and most have been unvaccinated. We also see stats from Bryan Health in Lincoln and see that they are filling up quickly since they reopened their COVID unit a short time ago. They have communicated that 100% of their patients under the age of 50 are unvaccinated and over 90% of patients over 50 are unvaccinated.” He added that a patient in their early 20s from Lancaster County died last week. “Also, and sadly, one of our patients transferred a few weeks ago, our youngest yet, died last weekend,” he said.

In addition, Bruntz said Community Hospital is again administering antibody infusions almost daily to help those testing COVID-positive to better fight the disease. “Of all these patients testing positive, we have had only a couple of vaccine breakthroughs, and their symptoms were relatively mild.”

Due to new OSHA regulations, Community Hospital is recently only allowed to have two COVID inpatients. This is because COVID patients require negative isolation rooms with anti-rooms, and Community Hospital only has two of these types of rooms available on the patient wing. If these two rooms are full, as they were a week ago, all other COVID patients needing inpatient care must be transferred to another hospital. 

Because of the uptick in COVID patients at Community Hospital, the hospital’s Incident Command system was once again activated, Bruntz said.

A recent report Bruntz received from CEO, James Linder, M.D., of Nebraska Medicine in Omaha said, “I hope that each of your hospitals is managing any increases in COVID cases due to the Delta variant. If this has not affected your community, then you are fortunate. Metro Omaha hospitals have been at, or are flirting with capacity limits. I expect it to get worse.”

Bruntz also shared a video link with Community Hospital staff. The video is of Dr. Catherine O’Neal, chief medical officer and infectious disease expert, at Our Lady of the Lake in Louisiana.  The video is heartfelt and well done. “There are no beds left. These are the darkest days of this pandemic. We are no longer giving adequate care to these patients,” she says. She talks of closing a unit because their staff is out sick from COVID. She urges staff and the public to get vaccinated. She adds that until there are higher vaccination rates, and because of the time it takes the vaccine to provide protection, masking, distancing and hygiene are the best protection. The video can be found at https://vimeo.com/582276147.

“I seriously thought we were crossing the finish line on this.  I was quite wrong,” Bruntz concluded.