Thomas Breen photo
City firefighters and paramedics doffing their isolation gowns, which YNHH is beginning to run low on.
(Updated) Around 1,000 Yale New Haven Health employees have either tested positive for the novel coronavirus or are symptomatic and awaiting test results, with just over 600 still out of work throughout the regional health care system.
And while YNHH maintains an “adequate” supply of personal protective equipment, including masks and gloves, it’s struggling to keep up supplies of isolation gowns worn by staff when treating coronavirus-positive patients.
Top YNHH officials and clinicians gave that update Tuesday during the regional health care system’s latest Covid-19 virtual town hall, held online via the Zoom teleconferencing app and on Facebook Live.
Click here, here, and here for previous YNHH-hosted virtual town halls over the past month.
Zoom
Tuesday morning’s YNHH virtual town hall.
YNHH President and CEO Marna Borgstrom, YNHH Chief Clinical Officer Thomas Balcezak, Yale New Haven Hospital Chief Operating Officer Keith Churchwell, and YNHH Senior Vice President Vin Petrini said that the regional health care system, which includes the local York Street and St. Raphael campuses, has conducted more than 23,000 novel coronavirus tests so far.
Balcezak said that roughly 5,000 of those tests have returned positive.
Borgstrom said the regional health care system has 790 Covid-positive inpatients in its hospital beds throughout Connecticut and Rhode Island as of Tuesday morning: 450 of those inpatients are in New Haven, 213 in Bridgeport, and roughly 100 in Greenwich, with smaller numbers in eastern Connecticut and Westerly, Rhode Island.
In New Haven’s hospitals, Churchwell said that 113 Covid-19 patients are currently in intensive care units (ICUs) and 72 are currently on ventilators.
Borgstrom (pictured) also said that the regional health care system has discharged over 1,000 patients who have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and recovered under the regional hospital system’s care.
“A majority of people who have entrusted their care to us have gotten well enough to be discharged either to home or another facility,” she said.
Churchwell added that New Haven’s hospital campuses are discharging roughly 100 patients a week.
Petrini (pictured) said that a total of 1,062 YNHH employees have been out of work for a period of time during the pandemic. He said the system has roughly 27,000 employees in total.
He also said that 603 of those workers have tested positive for Covid-19, while the remaining roughly 400 have had symptoms and are still awaiting test results.
Petrini said that a total of 614 employees throughout the regional health care system are currently out sick from work, either recovering or awaiting test results.
“These numbers represent all of our hospitals, not just Yale New Haven Hospital,” he clarified by email.
“We’ve seen a lot of employees that are coming back to the workplace” after they have recovered, he added during the town hall.
(Correction: Petrini initially said during the town hall that 1,000 had tested positive. He followed up with the Independent by email with a note that he had accidentally misstated that number. Roughly 600 have tested positive and another 400 are symptomatic, out sick, and awaiting results.)
“Very Close” To Peak
Officials also addressed the trajectory of the Covid-19 “curve” in the state.
Balcezak (pictured) said that Connecticut is likely “very close to where we will peak” in terms of coronavirus-related hospitalizations. He noted that in previous virtual town halls, he has predicted the regional Covid-19 surge to take place on April 15, then pushed that date out to April 18, then pushed it out again to April 23.
“The fact that it keeps getting later is actually good news,” he said. “It means that social distancing is working and we’re flattening the curve and pushing that peak date out” so that the hospital system is not overwhelmed by Covid-positive inpatients at any given moment.
He said he believes that the state will reach its Covid-19 peak soon, but that there are a lot of “ifs” in that statement. “If we continue to practice social distancing. If we’re able to hold fast on our hand hygiene and social isolation.”
He said the region will know that it has reached its peak after it sees 14 continuous days of declining hospitalization numbers.
Borgstrom said that, fortunately, Connecticut has not seen the “dire predictions” come true that state and hospital officials initially projected towards the start of this pandemic. She said that those predictions estimated that the state might need 10 times the number of hospital beds than it currently has in order to meet an overflowing demand of coronavirus-sick patients.
While the hospital has excess bed capacity at Yale’s Payne Whitney Gym and at a field hospital at Southern Connecticut State University, she said, the hospital system has so far not had to use those facilities.
“I think the reason that we’ve been able to see this curve flatten out and become manageable for us is because people have heeded the state’s requirements for social distancing, for staying at home,” she said. While this has come with a “tremendous personal price” for people who have not been able to work and for kids staying home from school, “we all have played a role in helping to flatten the curve and making the way to deal with this pandemic much more manageable than some of the earlier projections” had put forward.
Isolation Gown Supply Challenge
Balcezak said that the hospital continue to have “adequate” supplies of personal protective equipment, including masks and gloves.
He said that the greatest PPE supply challenges so far have not necessarily been in regards to N95 respirators, but more so with isolation gowns provided to staff taking care of Covid-positive patients.
Nevertheless, he said, YNHH’s access to PPE remains “steady and adequate.”
Employee Recognition Coming; No Layoffs Seen
When asked about YNHH paying hazard pay to its employees, as staff and community members are increasingly calling for, Borgstrom repeated her reluctance to embrace the concept of “hazard pay.” “I think it’s hard to define, and I think that people who are in health care have signed up for a different definition of ‘business as usual,’” she said.
That said, Borgstrom added that YNHH plans to announce Tuesday afternoon “a special recognition for all of the members of our health system who have been working so hard and so diligently for many months now to make sure that we are prepared for and that we are delivering care and caring for patients and their loved ones.”
“There are never going to be enough words and enough ways to say, ‘Thank you,’” she said.
She said that the planned employee recognition represents a stark departure from other hospitals throughout the country, many of which have turned to furloughing or laying off employees because of precipitous declines in revenue thanks to the cessation of elective prodedures.
Borgstrom said that YNHH was operating at roughly 90 percent occupancy before the pandemic. In order to make room for Covid-19 patients, she said, the hospital system is now operating at roughly 70 percent.
And yet, she said, the system has no intention of laying off any workers.
“We will do everything in our power to avoid layoffs,” she said. “That is not anywhere in a public or secret plan that we have.”
She also acknowledged that YNHH as a system has taken a significant financial hit due to its rush to buy PPE, its pause on all elective procedures, and its building out of additional bed capacity.
“We kind of threw our budgets out the window a couple months ago when we began to stand up every part of our organization for this pandemic because we knew that we had to be as safe and as prepared as we could possibly be,” she said.
“We think this recovery is going to be slow and fairly painful for the Yale New Haven Health system and the rest of the health care field.”
Heart Patients Urged Not To Avoid Hospital
Churchwell (pictured) noted that many fewer stroke and heart attack patients have been coming to YNHH for treatment during the pandemic, likely out of a concern of catching the novel coronavirus at the hospital.
Before the pandemic, he said, the most common causes of death in the United States were cardiovascular issues and strokes.
“We doubt that has actually changed,” he said. Although now, remarkably enough, Covid-19 is the number two most common cause of death in the country, he said.
He urged patients having heart issues to come to the hospital for treatment, even during the pandemic.
“We have the space and are taking the right and proper processes in place to keep those patients as safe as possible.”
“We will keep you as safe as we can,” he said.