Coronavirus variant strains hospitals across US

The Omicron variant is putting enormous strain on hospitals across the US, exhausting nurses and doctors, filling up beds and halting elective surgeries at many hospitals.

COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States reached a record high on Monday, according to a Reuters tally.

There were 132,646 people hospitalized with COVID, surpassing the record of 132,051 in January 2021.

Washington DC led the nation in new infections the past week, based on population, followed by Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Vermont.

Further compounding the healthcare strain is that some parts of the nation are dealing with a dual surge of the Omicron and Delta variants.

Hospitalizations for COVID-19 patients in New York City have passed the peak of last winter's surge.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency recently, saying that the state had more hospitalized COVID patients at that time than at any previous point during the pandemic.

Doctors say that the challenges hospitals face now are less about stockpiling equipment and more about staffing and contagion, The New York Times reported.

"Early on in the pandemic, we were worried about running out of things, like ventilators," Dr Ryan Maves, an infectious disease and critical care physician at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told the Times. "Now, the real limitations are obviously physical bed space, but even more so, it's staffing."

Dr Robert Glasgow of University of Utah Health, which has hundreds of workers out sick or in isolation, told The Associated Press, "This is getting very tiring, and I'm being very polite in saying that."

Adam Blackstone, vice-president of external affairs and strategic communications for the Hospital Association of Southern California, told China Daily that the most significant challenge to hospitals in the nation's most populous state dealing with the rapid increase in hospitalizations is the availability of healthcare professionals to care for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients, instead of physical space.

"These include even more significant staffing shortages, increased demand for additional healthcare services such as flu treatment, and now-urgent procedures that were put on hold earlier in the pandemic," he said.

California health authorities announced over the weekend that hospital staff members who test positive for the coronavirus but are symptom-free can continue working.

About 24 percent of some 5,000 hospitals are understaffed, and 199 more expect shortages this week, according to new data from the US Department of Health and Human Services.

The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, which oversees three main hospitals in the area, said some people who went to hospitals for other medical needs were found to have the virus after being tested.

"Other patients may have mild COVID that would not necessitate admission to the hospital, but because they have no place to safely isolate, get admitted to the hospital until a safe out-of-hospital housing environment can be established," a spokesperson from the agency told China Daily.

Approximately 40 percent of current COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the Los Angeles County hospital system are specifically due to COVID, the spokesperson said.

In New York state, nearly half of COVID-infected hospital patients were originally admitted for other health reasons and only learned they were positive through routine testing, Governor Kathy Hochul announced Friday.

Forty-two percent of current coronavirus patients in the state entered the hospital for ailments such as heart attacks, and later learned they were infected with the virus.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story.