This is an open letter asking why the number of available hospital beds is not among the benchmarks set for evaluating when to loosen restrictions on our state. It is our hope that you will download this letter and send it to everyone you deem necessary (local officials, public health committees, county commissioners, school boards, local newspapers, medical staff, etc.) Also please consider sharing this information on your social media. THIS LETTER HAS BEEN SENT TO ALL 170 NORTH CAROLINA SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES.
Thank you for your service as an NC leader during these challenging times. We’re writing about issues with COVID-19 decision-making benchmarks being used by NC that you may not be aware of.
As you know, we were told that decisions about COVID-19 were being made to “flatten the curve” to protect the hospitals from being overwhelmed by a flood of COVID-19 cases. In trying to understand the criteria that NC is using, it was shocking to learn that hospital capacity is not one of the benchmarks being used for the decisions that impact our safety, our financial security, and our quality-of-life.
The NC Benchmarks are vague and lack focus on hospital capacity.
We now know that the death rate is a fraction of what was predicted (even with quarantine in place). The News and Observer reported on May 18 that NC is using the following four “trend” benchmarks and three “capacity” benchmarks to determine whether or not to loosen social restrictions. Hospitalization is listed as one of the four trends, but the most important issue is hospital capacity, which is not one of the three capacity benchmarks (which are testing, contact tracing, and PPEs.) Not only do these “trends” benchmarks fail to measure hospital bed availability, they are vague and are not focused on the small percent of people who will require hospitalization.
Lower the percentage of positive COVID-19 tests: What kind of positive cases are they referring to here? The real question is how many cases are severe enough to warrant hospitalization.
Level off the number of patients hospitalized by the virus: Why isn’t this benchmark calculated in the context of hospital beds available? Mandy Cohen of NCHHS has stated that the state has plenty of available hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators. Why isn’t that fact front page news?
Declines in the total number of lab-confirmed cases: Again, what kind of lab-confirmed cases? For example, suppose 1 person in a business becomes infected so all 100 persons in that company are tested and 20 of those people are positive but asymptomatic. In a short time, these 20 people are actually a benefit to society as they become part of the herd we need for herd immunity.
Declines in the number of cases detected through patients with COVID-like symptoms being evaluated by health care professionals: Why do we need to measure symptoms when people with COVID-like symptoms can get test results for actual COVID-19 infection in less than 2 days?
The benchmark we need is hospital capacity.
North Carolina never saw numbers coming close to 7,987 beds and 862 bed shortage predicted for April 23. As of May 26, according to NCDHHS, among 78% of hospitals reporting in NC, there are 5,677 beds open in NC. On May 26, there were 621 patients hospitalized in NC. This means that we could see a nine-fold increase in hospitalizations without overwhelming the system.
We ask that you demand concrete benchmarks tied to hospital capacity to justify decisions that impact our safety, our financial security and our quality-of-life.
Thank you for your time.