By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
The Missouri Hospital Association is joining with its member hospitals urging people to not come to the emergency room unless absolutely necessary.
Hospital Association spokesman Dave Dillon says hospital overcrowding is still a big problem in the state, though the numbers are starting to look a little better.
"What we're seeing is we're down to about 32 to 33 hundred inpatients that were admitted for COVID-19, the high which was only about two weeks ago, was almost 4,000," Dillon tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post.
Dillon says the hospital association is urging people to go elsewhere to get tested if they are feeling symptoms of COVID-19, and to only come to the emergency room for serious ailments or injuries.
Dillon says that people need to realize the resources at hospitals are limited.
"If you need something that isn't pressing, you know, if you think you may have COVID, but you're not having the kind of symptoms that concern you from like the shortness of breath, or you know those indicators that you may need hospital services, but you just want to get tested or maybe you feel like you have the flu, because you know the flus circulating, you can get those kinds of services elsewhere," Dillon says.
Dillon says that if you do have COVID, it will ultimately be better for you to go elsewhere, because you won't be spending time sitting around waiting to get tested.
Dillon says as transmissible as the Omicron variant is, hospitals were not only seeing problems with overcrowding, but also within their staff that live in the affected communities.
"And so, we were not only seeing a surge in the demand for hospital services, and to some degree depending where you are in the state we still are," Dillon says. "But we also lost a lot of our staff members to quarantine or isolation, which plummeted the number of people available to provide the care that was surging."
Dillon says the message to not come to the emergency room is a hard one for hospitals to give, because hospitals feel an obligation to treat anyone who walks through their doors.