As we head into the New Year (which will be our third year of dealing with COVID hysteria), many people in Bucks County are growing increasingly concerned about the strain being put on the hospital system. In particular, the long-anticipated seasonal surge of COVID is underway, leading to new all-time highs in cases and further concern that COVID patients will overwhelm the hospitals.

Indeed, if you went to any Bucks County hospital emergency room today, you’d likely have to wait hours before seeing a healthcare provider. This same pinch can be felt when trying to schedule inpatient or outpatient services. In some places, elective procedures are being cancelled altogether. It feels much more difficult to get healthcare today than it did in 2020, and certainly much more difficult than it felt prior to the pandemic.

But is this a product of increased demand for healthcare (more sick people), or reduced supply (staff shortages)? Or both?

Fortunately, the federal government provides us with a clear answer. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services maintains a “Hospital Utilization Dashboard” which collects metrics from all hospitals registered with Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS). This data collection was started in June of 2020 to help federal, state, and local governments understand the impact of COVID on hospital capacity.

By diving into the HHS data, I’m going to show you that the demand being placed on our local hospitals is not as scary as you’ve been led to believe, in fact it’s pretty normal. That leaves us with one explanation for the crappy healthcare system we are experiencing today: staffing shortages. There is certainly a very real staffing crisis, which I’ve written about and attribute to healthcare workers being forced out by vaccine mandates and over-the-top mitigation requirements.

In this article I hope to put your mind at ease by showing you that the local hospital system is nowhere near overwhelmed, and that COVID is no longer even having a particularly threatening impact.

All information presented in this article is taken straight from the HHS Hospital Utilization dataset, which can be easily viewed for each major hospital here: Doylestown Hospital, Grand View Hospital, St. Luke’s Hospital (Upper Bucks Campus), St. Mary Medical Center, and Lower Bucks Hospital. Rothman Orthopaedic Specialty Hospital is not included for obvious reasons.

Point #1

Hospital Admissions and ICU Admissions Have Been Steady All Pandemic

From a county-wide perspective, both hospital admissions and ICU admissions have remained relatively flat throughout the entire pandemic.

The above chart was created by simply adding together each week’s hospital admissions and ICU admissions for all of the 5 Bucks County hospitals. What you see is that both total hospital admissions and ICU admissions remain relatively stable throughout the county all year long. This is in stark contrast to what you see in the news or on social media, where you’d probably be led to believe that hospital volume is skyrocketing. There are certainly ebbs and flows, but nothing dramatic.

While the news and social media shriek about how dire the situation currently is in hospitals, consider that the highest total hospitalization average that Bucks County has reached during the pandemic was 668.7 on December 4, 2020 (over a year ago). The highest ICU admission average Bucks County has reached was 91.1 on April 16, 2021. Consider that the next time you experience a 5-hour wait in a Bucks County emergency room. Why didn’t these long wait times exist back then, when the hospital load was at its highest? What staffing policies do the hospitals have now that they didn’t have then?

Point #2

COVID Prevalence Does Not Seem to Majorly Affect Hospital Load

One of the most important points that people often get wrong is that they think seasonal COVID surges have an additive effect on hospital volume. What I mean by this is that people assume that if hospital volume is X prior to a seasonal surge of COVID, and then the surge brings Y amount of COVID patients, then the new hospital volume will be X+Y. The data, however, shows that this isn’t really the case. Let’s take a look at the 5 Bucks County hospitals.

Doylestown Hospital

Grand View Hospital

St. Luke’s Hospital

St. Mary Medical Center

Lower Bucks Hospital

With the exception of Doylestown Hospital, there isn’t really any relationship at any hospital between Hospital admissions and COVID admissions. This strongly implies that COVID hospitalizations are not really “additive” in the sense that the hospital has a set volume that the COVID patients get added to. Instead, it appears that the patient volume is relatively stable, regardless of whether the patients are in the hospital for COVID or for something else.

To hammer home the point that COVID is not the preeminent factor in hospital volume, let’s look at county-wide Emergency Department visits.

What this data shows us is that even when more people come to the emergency room with COVID, that does not necessarily imply any increase in the total volume of emergency department visits. The two are not correlated. In fact, the most significant growth in Total Emergency Department visits of the whole pandemic occurred between January and April 2021, when COVID Emergency Department visits were stable. So something else must have been causing this dramatic increase in ER visits during the first several months of 2021. I wonder what that could be…

Lastly, the tables below show what the Emergency Department situation looks like since the Delta variant came on the scene at the beginning of July. Since that time, Total Emergency Room visits increased by 268, which is an 8% increase. COVID-19 Emergency Room visits, however, increased by 446, which is a 119% increase.

And for all of the apocalyptic, chicken-little, sky-is-falling, fire-and-brimstone that you hear about how hospitals are packed with COVID patients that can’t breath or are on ventilators….consider that since Delta began, Total Bucks County Hospital Admissions have only increased 16%, which is a nominal seasonal change.

What all of this data shows is that, despite COVID prevalence changing, the overall demand being placed on hospitals has remained relatively steady. All hospitals certainly experience seasonal surges, especially during the winter months, but there is not much evidence in this data to suggest that COVID is in any way overwhelming Bucks County hospitals.

Point #3

Don’t Fret About the School Mask Situation

In August, local hospital executives led by Doylestown Health CEO Jim Brexler and CMO Dr. Scott Levy forced Bucks County Health Department Director Dr. David Damsker to implement a mask recommendation in schools by claiming that the hospitals would be overwhelmed with pediatric COVID patients if he didn’t. I wrote about the “ambush”, as I call it, but I missed a huge gaping hole in their logic.

On June 28, 2021, the statewide indoor masking order expired. At that time, the vast majority of businesses and organizations quickly went mask optional. I distinctly remember feeling like I was at a ReOpen Bucks maskless shopping spree everywhere I went.

Not too long after that, Delta began to take off nationwide. Cases rose steadily throughout July and August, until flat-lining at the beginning of September, where they would remain flat until the winter surge began in late November.

Miraculously, while COVID cases climbed steadily over the summer, the hospitals were completely unaffected by it.

Between July 2 and September 3, 2021, the average number of daily Bucks County COVID cases increased by 2033%, from 7 to 149.3. Average Bucks County Hospitalizations, however, decreased by 3.3% during that timeframe.

Obviously Brexler, Dr. Levy, and all the other hospital executives knew about this summer data. They knew that the end of the indoor mask mandate did not impact hospitals at all (despite surging COVID cases). Yet they still absurdly claimed that maskless school children would overwhelm hospitals. It’s so stunningly embarrassing and devoid of logic that I find myself amazed anyone on Team Apocalypse can still listen to these frauds.

Either way, it should be reassuring to everyone to know that the hospitals were just fine following the end of the statewide indoor mask mandate, so they’ll be fine now that 76% of Bucks County schools are mask optional, too.

The Bottom Line

There’s no question that we’re in for quite a ride when it comes to COVID. If neighboring New York and New Jersey are any indication, we are just at the beginning of what will be a massive case surge over the next few weeks.

Fortunately, these massive surges appear to bring a much milder disease associated with the Omicron variant, as hospitalizations and deaths are not increasing in such a dramatic way.

I know that many Bucks Countians are very nervous about what is to come, but the data from HHS gives us good reason to be optimistic. From a volume perspective, the load being placed on Bucks County hospitals has been steady and manageable. Emergency Room and Urgent Care wait times will continue to be an issue until the staffing crisis abates, which probably won’t happen until after the United States Supreme Court strikes down the CMS vaccine mandate for healthcare workers and the hospitals return some level of normalcy to their operations. While we wait for that to happen, we can depend on the existing healthcare infrastructure to get us through this Winter no matter what COVID or any other disease may bring.

I want to end with a tweet I saw today, which is what actually spawned me to write this article.

Jackson Health is down in Florida, and they caught me by surprise because I guess that I’m just not used to hearing anything positive or hopeful come from a healthcare organization. Here in Bucks County, we never get much in the way of “good” news from our healthcare entities.

I’ve been tracking the HHS Hospital Utilization data (along with tons of other data that I keep regular tabs on) for months. Along the way, I’ve formed the insights that I just shared with you in this article. Reading the tweet from Jackson Health made me acutely aware of the fact that nobody in Bucks County has shared anything but dire pessimism when it comes to healthcare.

I found myself wishing that someone here would for once paint a picture that’s hopeful, and I realized that I had already created that picture by tracking and analyzing the data. I just had to write it all down. So I hope this article helps you, too, find some reason for optimism as we head into the New Year.