Hospital faces uphill battle as surge continues, same as last year

Northern Montana Health Care staff are facing a grimly familiar sight as COVID-19 cases rise and beds fill in a scene disturbingly similar to last year.

Northern Montana Health Care Chief of Staff Kevin Harada said workers are facing longer hours and greater stress as more and more positive cases crop up in the community, threatening to overwhelm the health care system in the not-too-distant future if things continue to get worse.

"Things are heating up," Harada said.

Havre Daily News had not received responses to requests for interviews from other members of the Northern Montana Health Care staff by printing deadline this morning.

The number of local cases continues to mount.

Hill County Health Department reported 35 new confirmed cases in its release Thursday, the second time this week the number of new cases was that high. The health department reported 36 new confirmed cases last Friday. It reported 63 new cases Monday reported over a three-day period, Sept. 11 through Monday.

The previous highest number was in October 2020 with 34 cases.

The health department reported Thursday 175 active cases and eight hospitalizations for Hill County residents. That compares to 119 active cases and two hospitalizations Sept. 16, 2020.

Hill County Health Department reported 11 new cases Wednesday night with 167 active cases.

The county has averaged almost 26 new cases a day in the last seven days.

Statewide surging straining health resources

Harada said health care partners around the state are seeing massive increases in COVID-19 patients, almost entirely composed of people who are not vaccinated and many have already had to cut back on elective surgeries again.

He said serious concern exists about the prospect of being overwhelmed as many facilities across the U.S. have been, with Montana's COVID-19 numbers more closely resembling theirs every day.

Harada said Northern Montana Health Care and other health care facilities in the state do have protocols in place for shifting staff to avoid burnout and extreme stress due to workload, but he's hoping Havre's hospital won't need to use them, as it may require they need to follow some of their partners in halting elective surgeries.

He said it's something they can do if needed, but they've seen the consequences of delaying these procedures, technically non-essential though they might be.

"Elective surgeries are only elective to a point," he said.

Continued surge 'disheartening'

Harada said the fact that this situation is so similar to the one the hospital faced in 2020 is greatly disheartening for him and his colleagues.

"Things are starting to look exactly like they did last year," he said. "We have a shortage of tests, we have a nationwide shortage of medication. ... We're starting to see the same staffing shortages, the same stresses."

It doesn't exactly feel like nothing has been learned, he said, because a lot has been learned about COVID-19 and that knowledge has lead to the development of tools to fight it, namely the vaccines, but still the community is in the same boat as last year because the solution is being rejected by so many.

"We've learned so much ... and yet we're in the exact same place," he said.

Harada said he also wants to remind people of the importance of getting tested.

He said monoclonal antibody treatments are available at NMH for high-risk COVID-19 cases and they are extremely effective if treatment is initiated early, so people need to get tested so they know if they need treatment.

Need for vaccination

Harada said the fact that the hospital is still admitting so many patients with COVID-19, and not one that he can remember was a breakthrough case, is proof of the vaccines' effectiveness.

Harada said the vaccine is virtually a guarantee that they will not become severely ill at this point, and while it's good that many people in the community have gotten it, it also means that virtually all the suffering and death being seen was completely preventable, a fact that weighs heavily on him and his colleagues.

He said the health care community has tried everything it can think of to help people understand that the vaccine is the only way COVID-19 is going to go away, but distrust in these general campaigns can't seem to be overcome, and that fact is really starting to affect people in health care, including those at Northern Montana Health Care.

"To see 50 percent of our population shun something that can prevent all this pain suffering and even death, it's disheartening," he said.

Harada said he's been having conversations with his patients about the vaccine and he has seen some success in convincing them that there is nothing to fear and everything to gain. He said the hospital still vaccinates people nearly every day, but that trickle of people doesn't amount to much, and even if that trend continues it will take a very long time to reach herd immunity.

He encouraged other doctors to sit down with their patients and take the time to do the same.

Harada talked about two respects in which the situation this year is different from last year, but neither are exactly positive.

The first is that they are seeing younger and younger patients and they are sicker than they were last year.

He said this is driven primarily by the fact that the community's older members are much more consistently vaccinated than its younger and middle age ranges.

He said, given that the elderly were and are most at risk of serious illness and death due to COVID-19, it is great that they have been so diligent in getting vaccinated, something he thanked the community's older members for, but seeing young people suffer from a disease that is at this point almost entirely preventable is difficult for staff to see.

"It gets to you sometimes," Harada said.

Ignoring the pandemic

The other thing that's different is how the community outside the hospital is reacting to the pandemic, or more accurately how it isn't.

He said there is a surreal feeling for him and his colleagues, to walk out of the hospital after a long shift of dealing with COVID-19 and all the suffering that comes with it and see a community that is, for the most part, acting like the pandemic is over.

To some degree, he said, this isn't wholly surprising, as people don't see what he sees every day at the hospital, and it can be easy not to think about it unless its happening to people you know.

"We can't project the pain and suffering inside of the hospital, so when you look at the outside world we have beautiful sunshine, we have soccer games going on, we have people playing in the park, and no one sees the pain and suffering until it hits them directly," Harada said.

He said, on some level, people just don't seem to believe it's happening, but when it does hit them things change quickly.

He said people admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 are often scared, and unfortunately there are times when hospital staff can't do much for them.

A different kind of disease

He said COVID-19 functions differently than any other disease they've dealt with and the health care community has effectively had to invent an entire new practice of medication to treat it. But sometimes they get cases that don't respond to treatment and they just have to monitor the patient and hope, which is always difficult for doctors and nurses to watch, especially because the case itself didn't have to happen.

"Those are the cases that really drain you," Harada said. "You can put all the time and energy in you want, but they are ultimately at the mercy of what the virus is going to do and that's the hard part, knowing if we could have gotten that person educated, or vaccinated, or combated some misinformation two months ago they wouldn't be in that situation."

Despite all of this, he said, NMH and health care workers are still prepared to take on whatever comes and do what needs to be done to take care of the community, and that won't stop.

He did, however, have one plea to the community; get vaccinated.

He said the the conflicts about safety measures in schools and businesses wouldn't need to happen at all if everyone got vaccinated.

"That is the answer," he said.