U.S. multi-state health care system is under severe pressure, medical staff "return to work with illness"

According to US media reports, in many states in the United States, the influx of new crown patients has greatly occupied the existing medical resources, and the medical system has been overwhelmed.

Massachusetts General Hospital is one of the largest health systems in Massachusetts. The hospital reportedly postponed more than 2,000 surgeries a week due to the large number of COVID-19 patients in need of treatment. Hospitals also don't have enough space for patients.

Ali Raja, medical specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital: We had to treat patients in the aisles of the hospital and chairs in the waiting room, and just last week we were forced to shut down part of the emergency department because we didn't have enough medical staff.

In the United States, a similar phenomenon is widespread. According to the data released by the US Department of Health and Human Services on the 17th, there are currently 156676 cases of hospitalized covid-19 cases in the united states. As can be seen from the above figure, the bed occupancy rate of many states and regions in the United States has reached more than 80%, and the maximum can reach 86.4%. According to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly a quarter of hospitals in the United States report a severe shortage of manpower.

Megan Laney, Ph.D., School of Public Health, Brown University: Let me tell you about my shift, where 10 nurses fell in the emergency room, and sometimes there were dozens of patients waiting for medical attention, for hours. Patients came one after another, and after experiencing such a wave of patients, we felt exhausted.

Medical staff "return to work with illness" A large number of patients are infected

In order to supplement medical staff, according to the latest guidelines of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many medical staff who have been diagnosed with new crown pneumonia have "returned to work with illness". However, the US Business Insider website quoted data from the US Department of Health and Human Services on the 16th to report that one week after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines, the number of patients diagnosed with the new coronavirus after two weeks of hospitalization in the United States soared by 80%, from about 1200 to 2200.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new epidemic prevention guideline on December 23 last year, suggesting that if medical staff are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and continue to improve after diagnosis, they can return to work after 7 days of isolation, and provide a new negative test certificate within 48 hours of returning to work; if the hospital is short of manpower, the isolation time can even be shortened to 5 days, and no testing is required after returning to work. Previously, the isolation period stipulated by the CDC was 10 days.

Giorgio Caballero, a researcher at the non-profit organization Pioneer in the fight against COVID-19, said that many patients who were originally hospitalized for other diseases found to have tested positive for COVID-19 during their hospitalization, and the only place where they could be infected with the new crown virus was the hospital.