WORCESTER, Mass. — After weeks of preparation, it was ‘go-time’ Sunday at the DCU Center COVID-19 field hospital. At 2 p.m., an ambulance rolled into a bay marked DOOR 27, depositing the first COVID-19 transfer patient of the fall and winter surge.
“We’re going to do the crawl, walk, run phase,” said Peter Lancette, a registered nurse and associate chief nursing officer for the facility. “So initially we’re going to start off with a limited census and build as there is a need.”
That limited census will consist of 25 patients initially; the facility can accommodate 240. And they won’t be the sickest of those with the virus.
“We’re taking the hospital in-patient level, not critical care,” Lancette said. “We do have critical care patient abilities. If a patient does decompensate we’ll be able to resuscitate them and get them back to a brick-and-mortar facility.”
Those brick-and-mortar facilities are depending on the field hospital to help free up beds for patients with other conditions.
“In the spring when we did it, this was absolutely critical,” said Dr. Eric Dickson, the president and CEO of UMass Memorial Medical Center. “If we didn’t have the beds that we have here, we would have been overwhelmed. If we get anything like we were in the springtime, in terms of admissions, we’re going to need the field hospital, again, to take the extra volume the hospitals can’t handle.”
And there are troubling signs the field hospital could, potentially, be very busy.
Dr. Dickson said area hospitals already have patients waiting for beds. And the state just saw three straight days with positive COVID-19 tests exceeding 5,000 per day. Dr. Dickson said those numbers had everything to do with people coming in contact with one another over Thanksgiving.
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“I think what we saw at Thanksgiving is most of the people doing the right thing and just having Thanksgiving with their household,” Dr. Dickson said. “But some didn’t, and that caused a big increase in COVID that is out there now. And that increase is going to carry into the December holidays and even into New Year’s Day.”
Dr. Dickson said the UMass Memorial testing facility saw a dramatic rise recently in those testing positive.
“We tested over 1,000 people from central Massachusetts and it came back at 14% positive,” Dr. Dickson said. “That’s a jump from 8% positive pre-Thanksgiving.”
Dickson said the positive-test rate can be used to predict the level of hospital beds needed weeks down the road.
“So we are nowhere near the peak of this surge in terms of hospitalizations,” he said.
Since spring, a few important things have changed about hospitalized COVID-19 patients. First, Dickson said, they are younger, with an average current age of 56. In spring, many nursing home patients wound up hospitalized, but strict testing has kept those facilities in better shape during this surge.
And while a vaccine hasn’t arrived yet, there are treatment options for COVID-19 patients.
“Now, we have remdesivir, which we didn’t have,” Dickson said. “We have Decadron [dexamethasone], a steroid, to help patients; we have convalescent plasma, we have monoclonal antibodies.”
What the field hospital also has is a struggle ahead to fight employee fatigue. Dr. Dickson said health care workers are in shorter supply than in spring. But on day one of operation, there was enthusiasm among the staff to get the job done.
“I think having this resource is going to be really, really helpful,” said Caitlin Lynch, a nurse. “We don’t want to wait to the last minute to need to come here and open this up. We want to be ready to go.”
“I think it’s going to be very successful,” said Jane Dylewicz, a former Worcester resident, who came to work from Tampa, Fla. “The team seems fabulous.”
“I can’t wait to get started,” added Jessica Moffett, a nursing assistant.
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