Local hospital staff is once again scrambling to find bed space to keep up with the rapidly growing number of new COVID-19 cases in Odessa.
Medical Center Health System reported a total of 52 COVID patients housed at Medical Center Hospital as of Friday morning, according to an MCHS news release. Twenty-six of those patients are listed in critical condition, with 20 of them currently on ventilators.
MCH was forced to reopen an extra unit to care for the overflow of new COVID patients this week, MCHS President and CEO Russell Tippin announced earlier this week.
“We are concerned with bed space and staffing at this time,” MCHS Director of Public Relations Trevor Tankersley said on Friday. “We’re still able to move some room around (to handle overflow), but yes, it is a concern.”
Of the 26 patients listed in critical care on Friday, 22 had not yet been vaccinated, Tankersley confirmed. Forty-one of the 52 COVID patients currently being treated at MCH are unvaccinated.
Fifty-one of the hospital’s current COVID patients are Odessa/Ector County residents, according to the MCHS news release. One patient is from McCamey. The ages of the patients range from 18 to 83.
Odessa Regional Medical Center earlier this week reported only two COVID patients in the intensive care unit, with one of them on a ventilator.
But ORMC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Rohith Saravanan said those numbers were only low because of the hospitals lack of bed space.
“The main reason for (ORMC’s) low census is that we are currently short on ‘reverse isolation ICU capable’ bed capacity,” Saravanan said. “We will have some new beds open and staffed in the next two weeks. So, we are not able to take incoming COVID ICU transfers at this time.”
COVID cases have exploded in Ector County during the past month, according to numbers provided by the Texas Department of State Health Services this week.
On Tuesday, DSHS reported there were 600 active COVID cases in Ector County. On Thursday, that number had risen to 931 active cases. There were 163 cases reported locally on July 12.
The dramatic increase has prompted Saravanan and other local health officials to plead with residents to get vaccinated. Only about 40 percent of Ector County residents have so far been vaccinated — half the number officials say is needed to reach herd immunity.
“To really be able to say that COVID can no longer survive in our community, we would need to reach an 80 percent vaccination rate,” Saravanan has said.
