It was beautiful weekend here in North Carolina. There was that magical rebirth in the air that only comes with Spring. The kind that makes you want to sit out on the porch with a glass of iced tea, keep the tv off and pretend that the world is doing just fine. After all, the daily and cumulative average of all COVID-19 tests in North Carolina had remained steadily, and somewhat reassuringly below 5% for the past few weeks.
But a look at the numbers on Saturday quickly showed the danger in that kind of thinking. Positive tests increased significantly here to 7.19% on Saturday, March 28. Naturally, I did what any semi-sentient being would do when faced with a catastrophic problem to which they can offer no solution. I ignored it and hoped it would go away. “Maybe it’s an outlier. Let’s see what it looks like tomorrow.”
But Sunday brought no relief. Positive tests on that day more than doubled to 16.36%. What’s equally disturbing is that testing here is significantly delayed. Our inpatient Coronavirus tests are taking about 8 days to return. The swabs sit and wait to be processed for 7 days, and the results are released the next day. Assuming that this is going on in other hospitals in the area, this suggests that the tests that are being reported today may actually have been performed on patients several days ago, or even a week ago.
This projection estimates that NC will have enough general beds to take care of COVID-19 patients, but there will be a shortage of about 300 ICU beds. Area hospitals including ours have been working hard to prepare for this by expanding our bed capacity. I am hopeful that if the number of patients we see falls within projections we will be able to handle the surge. But it will not be easy.
Deep Ramachandran, M.D. is a Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep Medicine physician, founding CHEST Journal Social Media Editor, and co-Chair of ACCP Social Media Work Group. He blogs at Caduceusblog. He is on twitter @Caduceusblogger.