Omicron surge is stressing Beaufort Co. hospital systems in a ‘completely different’ way
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COVID-19 in the Lowcountry
Here’s the latest on the omicron variant surge, COVID-19 guidance and more in the Lowcountry.
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The omicron variant is stressing Beaufort County’s pandemic-weary hospital systems, but not in the way that you might expect.
As one physician put it: “This is completely different than what we’ve ever seen before.”
Omicron, the super contagious variant that was discovered in South Africa late last year, is now driving a surge of coronavirus infections across the county, leading to a spike in demand for testing and treatment at local outpatient clinics and emergency rooms, hospital leaders say.
Beaufort Memorial Hospital’s Port Royal Express Care location, for example, is now averaging 100 patients per day instead of 50 or 60, with many people exhibiting upper respiratory, cold-like symptoms such as a runny nose, hospital CEO Russell Baxley said in a Tuesday interview.
The hospital’s daily ER patient volumes, Baxley added, also have increased by 30% to 40%.
“We’ve seen — at times — two- or three-hour waits, just because the demand is so high,” he said.
Yet despite the surge of cases, Baxley said the hospital has recorded only a slight uptick in the number of COVID-19 inpatients admitted to the medical center for care. Most have been unvaccinated.
“From an outpatient perspective, this is the worst it’s been,” he said. “From an inpatient perspective, right now we’re doing OK.”
With just 15 coronavirus inpatients at the hospital as of early Tuesday, and with only one of those people in the intensive care unit, Baxley said that anecdotally, it does appear that omicron produces milder disease than previous COVID-19 variants, including delta.
(Before the most recent spike, the hospital typically was treating between two and four COVID-19 inpatients each day, Baxley said. At one point in mid-September, during the 2021 delta surge, the hospital had 60 coronavirus inpatients.)
Carlye Gilbert, the infection preventionist at Hilton Head Regional Healthcare, which includes Hilton Head and Coastal Carolina hospitals, echoed Baxley’s observations.
Omicron appears to be extremely transmissible, Gilbert said, but not as virulent. The county’s case trends, she said, seem to match up with international data on the variant’s severity.
A team of Hong Kong researchers recently found that omicron replicated about 70 times faster in tissue from the bronchial tubes — which carry air into the human lungs — than delta and the original SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
However, omicron also replicated more than 10 times slower in lung tissue than the original SARS-CoV-2, “which may suggest lower severity of disease,” the team reported.
“It’s a sore throat, and sinus pressure,” Gilbert said of local coronavirus symptoms, “then it becomes weakness, even altered mental status, where people are just profoundly weak and they’re not acting like themselves.”
Residents, she said, are not presenting with COVID-19 pneumonia. (Hilton Head Regional Healthcare, as of early Wednesday, was treating 12 coronavirus inpatients, with three of those people in ICU beds, according to a hospital spokeswoman.)
Baxley added that hospitalized patients are now being admitted for shorter lengths of time at Beaufort Memorial Hospital, spending an average of roughly three to four days at the medical center instead of seven to eight days, which was typical last year as delta swept across the Lowcountry.
The omicron surge, Baxley said, seems to be characterized by a dramatic spike in mild cases, and he expects it to inundate outpatient centers, but not inpatient beds, over the next few weeks.
“With the community transmission that we’re seeing ... if you have a suspicion (of being infected), you probably have it,” Gilbert said in a Tuesday interview.
How long will the surge last?
Some health experts fear that omicron will still overwhelm hospitals with a deluge of inpatients, simply because of the sheer number of cases that it generates.
In South Carolina, hospitalizations are rising, with 1,334 coronavirus inpatients being treated across the state on Tuesday, according to data from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
That’s a 65.1% jump from a week ago, DHEC says. (For context: More than 2,500 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized statewide at one point in mid-September during last year’s delta surge.)
But South Africa’s ongoing epidemic could serve as a bellwether for how omicron might cut through the Lowcountry and the rest of the Palmetto State without a devastating spike in hospital admissions later this month.
“The speed with which the Omicron driven fourth wave rose, peaked and then declined has been staggering. Peak in four weeks and precipitous decline in another two,” wrote Fareed Abdullah, director of the South African Medical Research Council’s office on HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis research, in a Dec. 30 tweet. “This Omicron wave is over in the City of Tshwane. It was a flash flood more than a wave.”
“COVID-19 bed occupancy at the peak of our Omicron wave was half of what it was in our third (Delta driven) wave,” Abdullah added.
Baxley, of Beaufort Memorial Hospital, expects something similar to happen in South Carolina.
“Talking with DHEC, MUSC (the Medical University of South Carolina), the South Carolina Hospital Association, I think everyone’s kind of thinking the same thing: That (omicron) is spreading so quickly across all the communities that this will burn out really fast — that you’re going to see an extremely high surge in the outpatient setting for the next couple of weeks, and then it’s expected to drop off a cliff at the end of January, beginning of February,” Baxley said.
Beaufort County, as of Wednesday, was averaging 113 newly confirmed infections per day, DHEC data show.
Two weeks ago, that average was 19 cases per day.
‘It’s really taken a toll’
Baxley and Gilbert added that local hospitals are grappling with coronavirus exposures among staff members.
“It’s putting a strain across the system,” Baxley said.
Gilbert said she did not have the exact number of Hilton Head Regional Healthcare employees currently in isolation or quarantining, but stressed that “it’s a challenge throughout our country right now.”
Even pre-pandemic, Gilbert said, “we were really in a crisis for nursing staff and for clinical staff. ... I think throughout our COVID response, the last 22 months, it’s really taken a toll.”
Baxley also did not know the aggregate number of isolations and quarantines among Beaufort Memorial Hospital’s roughly 1,600 employees, but he said the medical center has tested about 20 to 30 staff members this week due to community exposures during the holiday season, among other reasons.
“If you need our services, be patient with our staff. Be nice, be kind,” Baxley said. “They’re working as hard as they can. The waits are going to be long. And there’s going to be a lot of frustration out there.”
COVID-19 testing supplies, for example, are difficult to come by right now, he said.
Gilbert also asked residents to be courteous to health care workers.
Some people, she said, are still afraid to go anywhere in public due to COVID-19, so they have been delaying their medical care, then later ending up at the hospital “very sick.”
“That is what we’re really seeing inside of our walls,” Gilbert said.
This story was originally published January 6, 2022 at 9:35 AM.
