Doctor: Hospital surge puts others at serious risk
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — If heart attacks, strokes, concussions are not addressed immediately, they can become life-threatening.
However, many hospitals have to turn these patients away. There’s just no room; instead, the beds are filled with coronavirus-infected patients.
They are intubated, on ventilators and requiring additional oxygen for weeks to keep them alive.
“I worry about those people who have problems unrelated to COVID,” Dr. Graham Carlos, chief of medicine at Eskenazi Health, told News 8. “People who need hip surgery or who have a heart attack or a stroke, they may not have access. I was reading a story just now from a hospital review email and the title was ‘Heart patient dies after being turned down by 43 ICUs amid COVID-19 surge.’”
Hospitalizations and deaths, Carlos says, are happening in Indiana and across the rest of the country.
Carlos says the patients he sees are either unvaccinated, or had COVID-19 and don’t see the need to get the vaccine.