said the hospital system is in solid shape<\/a>.<\/p>“There\u2019s a lot of folks that are fear mongering and telling Oklahomans we don\u2019t have the hospital capacity. Simply not true,” Stitt said.<\/p>
One of Stitt\u2019s top health officials weighed in Monday on hospital capacity during an Oklahoma House of Representatives interim study on pandemic response. Oklahoma National Guard Lt. Col. Matt Stacy, who oversees the state\u2019s surge plan, said that although the trends are concerning, hospitals can always begin cancelling elective procedures.<\/p>
Stacy said that state officials have worked with hospital administrators and the Oklahoma Hospital Association to create the plan, but also on how to depict the situation publicly.<\/p>
“I think you’re going to see some of the messaging change,\u201d he said. \u201cInstead of scare Oklahomans \u2014 right, which I think has been the tactic \u2014 instead it\u2019s to encourage Oklahomans. Explain to them that we\u2019re your health care system. We can treat you. We do have a bed for you. Maybe there will be delays in other things. Maybe there are things that are going to be pushed back, but there is a bed here for you, and you\u2019re going to get treated.\u201d<\/p>
During the briefing the Stitt administration held on Tuesday, several hospital administrators spoke. They all touched on the ebb-and-flow nature of hospital and ICU figures, but they all also warned that without a change in trends, capacity issues are inevitable.<\/p>
\u201cI tell you this in all sincerity, Oklahoma,\u201d said Integris Chief Medical Officer Julie Watson. \u201cWe are in trouble.\u201d<\/p>
She said that without increased mask use, hospitals will have to delay care, ratchet down services, and start making awful decisions.<\/p>
\u201cOur worst nightmare right now, for any one of us physicians or health care workers, is having to choose between a patient in a car accident and a patient with Covid,\u201d she said. \u201cAn early cancer diagnosis and Covid. Surgery for a patient who needs it and Covid. Every single Oklahoman is important. We can make a difference and preserve resources for all patients by simply wearing a mask. We must prevent the preventable.\u201d<\/p>
In Tulsa, Mayor GT Bynum spoke during the city\u2019s weekly briefing Tuesday, saying he hoped the news that Tulsa\u2019s ICUs were full the night before would be a wake up call. And that although capacity is fluid, it\u2019s having a real effect already.<\/p>
\u201cWe had one city employee who contracted COVID-19, had just shy of a 106-degree fever and got turned away from two hospitals because his respiratory function wasn\u2019t bad enough,\u201d he said.<\/p>
He talked about another city employee who faced a similar situation, but was finally admitted after he had developed pneumonia.<\/p>
“That’s the threshold that our community is facing right now,\u201d he said.<\/p>
The Oklahoma State Department of Health releases a coronavirus data report nightly. As of Tuesday night\u2019s report<\/a>, 6 percent of the state\u2019s staffed ICU beds were available \u2014 57 of 954. That figure reflects all ICU beds filled by Covid and non-Covid patients. It also stated that a record number of Oklahomans were hospitalized with the coronavirus: 1,157, with 336 of them in the ICU.<\/p>Hospitalizations are what\u2019s known as a lagging indicator. They tend to reflect what another number, case counts, did about two weeks before. Oklahoma\u2019s case counts continue to grow. As of Monday, the 7-day average again broke a new record, surpassing 2,000 in one day.<\/p>
* Editor’s note: This story was updated at 10:31 a.m. Tuesday to correct an error. Gov. Kevin Stitt appeared on KRMG and discussed hospitalizations last week, not this week.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As intensive care units run out of capacity and hospital administrators ring alarm bells, the Stitt administration has maintained that hospital capacity is not under threat, and that messaging otherwise is a tactic to scare Oklahomans.Gov. Kevin Stitt conducted a briefing for the first time since October on Tuesday, where he joined his health commissioner […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":213,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,16],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33499"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34103,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33499\/revisions\/34103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}