“Exhausted” and overwhelmed by the influx of mostly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients, Dr. James Samuel Pope, director of the intensive care unit at Hartford Hospital, Connecticut in the United States , hopes that this Omicron wave of the pandemic will be the last.
“The frustration is very real (…) we are all exhausted”, declares bluntly the American doctor who exceptionally opened the doors of his intensive care unit to AFP.
After almost two years of an epidemic in the United States, the most bereaved country in the world with 847,000 dead, “among those of us who have been here from the start, it is difficult to find someone enthusiastic who think it was a positive experience that changed his life”, slices Doctor Pope, who runs from one bed to another in his unit, the walls of which he has pushed several times since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. .
AFP
At the bedside of his patients, most of them unvaccinated, sometimes immunocompromised, here he inquires about the possible “pains” of a woman, there he asks a man if he “breathes” correctly and wants to hear him “cough” frankly.
Monitoring the heart rate of an intubated patient, scrutinizing X-rays of another patient, Mr. Pope converses with his nurses and “(is) surprised, even now, to see so many unvaccinated people who still come here”.
One of them replies that indeed their patients “are all unvaccinated”.
AFP
Difficult for the nursing staff of the Hartford hospital to keep their faith and their enthusiasm for their profession intact: “No, I will not continue to do this, it is exhausting. I hope that’s it. I hope this is the last big wave, ”says Doctor Pope.
AFP
In any case, the number of new cases of COVID-19 was still falling on Wednesday in the United States, raising hopes that the peak of the wave of the Omicron variant may have been crossed: the average number of new daily cases rises this week to around 700,000, up from almost 800,000 last week, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
AFP
But the United States is still seeing some 1,700 deaths a day and a record number of hospitalizations due to COVID-19, with nearly 160,000 patients occupying a bed.
AFP
And like all caregivers battling Omicron, Dr Pope finds that “there are enough people catching it that even the small percentage of people who are really sick are beyond (the capacity of) our ERs”.