Keith Royston, Special for The Star Press
For Indiana hospitals, 2022 is starting off just the way they were dreading.
Hospitals from Richmond to Muncie to Lafayette are again dangerously low on bedspace in their intensive care units at the same time they’re dealing with a boom in COVID-19 cases and crushing demands on their staffs — all the while a significant percentage of staffers are themselves quarantined.
Physician executives at hospitals around the state said Tuesday that ICU beds have been and continue to be in dangerously short supply as the delta variant sends hundreds of people to acute care and the omicron variant is still weeks away from peaking.
More:Indiana limits COVID-19 rapid testing due to shortage
The United States set a new global record for most daily COVID-19 cases with one million new infections on Monday, Bloomberg reported.
At Reid Health, based in Richmond, 28 of 30 ICU beds were occupied on Monday, Thomas Huth, a physician and vice president of medical affairs, said in an email interview Tuesday. “We always try to reserve one ICU bed as a ‘code bed,’ but there was a day last week when we didn’t even have that code bed available,” Huth said.