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A hospital bed sits in one of the tarp-enclosed rooms at North Carolina s field hospital in Lenoir. Each room will also have a heart monitor and other medical equipment.
North Carolina’s hospitals are quickly filling up with patients stricken by the coronavirus, even as health systems in some of the hardest-hit regions the Triad and greater Charlotte area take steps to make room for a wave of new patients.
The looming crisis is fueled by lack of clinical staff, not by lack of physical space for beds.
Health care workforce shortages have been chronic and persistent in some areas of the state, particularly rural ones. But with virtually every hospital in the state drawing on a finite pool of available providers, more than 4,000 North Carolina hospital beds are either unstaffed or were not reported to the state, data from the Department of Health and Human Services shows. COVID-19 infections in health care workers have also compounded the shortage.
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Rosalind Cornwell, standing, and Stefany Esparza, with Atrium Health’s Teammate Health, demonstrate an antibody testing session.
On Oct.7, the Greensboro-based Cone Health system had 57 COVID-19 patients across their small network of hospitals. A month later that number had almost doubled. A month after that, it was up to a total of 167.
And the numbers keep climbing.
“We’re doing this to ourselves,” Bruce Swords, the system’s chief medical executive, told his colleagues.
According to Doug Allred, the system spokesperson, medical leaders at Cone are frustrated, and they’re worried about having enough staff to handle what appears to be a continuing surge of patients.