GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Spectrum health has officially moved to ‘red status’ for the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a video sent to employees this week.
Spectrum is West Michigan’s largest health system. Its move to red status comes just days after the Region 6 Healthcare Coalition, made up of health leaders from 13 counties, said its hospitals are “at a tipping point" due to COVID, other illnesses and staffing shortages.
In the announcement video to staff, Spectrum Health West Michigan President Darryl Elmouchi, MD, said the hospital census has been “incredibly high for months and now is even higher because of so much more COVID.”
“We have nearly 400 COVID patients in our hospitals. Every day for the past two weeks we’ve had upwards of 20 to 50 or more borders in our ER – that means we have patients that have been admitted that are waiting for beds upstairs,” Elmouchi said.
“Most importantly and most alarmingly, is that positivity is growing dramatically amongst our communities. We saw a steady plateau in the mid-teens for our percent positives for a number of months and now, in the last ten days, that has increased to the mid-twenties.”
On Nov. 10, Spectrum’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joshua Kooistra said the hospital was the fullest it had ever been, with more than 1,100 patients in all three Spectrum Health hospitals, including Blodgett, Butterworth and Helen DeVos Children's Hospital. At the time, 272 of those patients had COVID-19.
Since then, that number has increased. According to the Spectrum Health COVID-19 Dashboard, the system had 370 coronavirus patients as of Thursday, Nov. 18.
With an increasing positivity rate, partnered with staffing and supply shortages, Elmouchi said the next two weeks will not be easy for employees.
“We don’t know what happens next,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we will peak and plateau and come down rapidly. But given the positivity and given what we are seeing, we don’t even have a color for what comes next, so we’re going to focus really hard on the now.”
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