The continuing surge in coronavirus is forcing Avera McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls to double up patients in ICU rooms:
Chief Medical Officer Mike Elliott with Avera McKennan hospital confirms patients are two to a room in some cases.
“Not every room in our ICU is capable of that. Frankly we don’t have enough staff to do it in every room even if we wanted to,” he explains. “But yes, that’s the reality of the situation. We’ve had to double up some rooms with some patients” [Jackie Hendry, “Sioux Falls Hospital Staff Struggle Under Latest Surge,” SDPB, 2020.11.02].
KELO Radio hears from one woman that Sioux Falls had no ICU beds available in early October:
Darla Halvorsen said her father, Darwin Peckham, had to be moved to Fargo because there weren’t any ICU beds available in Sioux Falls.
Peckham, 73, went to the hospital on October 9. He was experiencing severe internal bleeding and needed multiple blood transfusions. He and his wife drove from their home in Bristol to a Sanford hospital in Webster.
“We get there, and they could see that this problem was bigger than they could handle,” Peckham said [Liz Ryan, “Sioux Falls Woman Raises Concerns After Her Father Is Flown Out of State for Lifesaving Care,” KELO Radio, 2020.11.02].
The stress on our hospitals is our fault:
“There’s this horrible disconnect between what they see when they walk through the halls of the hospital, when they take care of these patients, when they hold a patient’s hand as their last heartbeat occurs or their last breath occurs,” says Dr. Elliott. “And then they go out into the community and they watch people gathering in masses of hundred, two hundred people not wearing their masks, not seeming to understand that this is real, folks. People are dying from this” [Hendry, 2020.11.02].
South Dakotans like to brag about their niceness, their willingness to help their neighbors. Our failure to look out for our neighbors and our health care system should put the lie to that brag.
We here in trump land only give a care about ourselves…