By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. — The Missouri Hospital Association is joining with its member hospitals urging people to not come to the emergency room unless absolutely necessary.
Hospital association spokesman Dave Dillon said hospital overcrowding is still a big problem in the state, though the numbers are starting to look a better.
"We're down to about 3,200 to 3,300 inpatients that were admitted for COVID-19. The high, which was only about two weeks ago, was almost 4,000," Dillon told KFEQ/St. Joseph Post.
Dillon said the hospital association is urging people to go elsewhere to get tested if they are feeling symptoms of COVID-19 — and to only come to the emergency room for serious ailments or injuries.
Dillon said people need to realize hospital resources are limited.
"If you think you may have COVID, but you're not having the kind of symptoms that concern you ... but you just want to get tested, or maybe you feel like you have the flu, because you know the flu's circulating, you can get those kinds of services elsewhere," Dillon said.
Dillon said if you do have COVID, it will ultimately be better to go elsewhere, because you won't be spending time sitting around waiting to get tested.
Dillon said as transmissible as the omicron variant is, hospitals were not only seeing problems with overcrowding, but also within their staff.
"We're not only seeing a surge in the demand for hospital services," Dillon said, "but we also lost a lot of our staff members to quarantine or isolation, which plummeted the number of people available to provide the care that was surging."
Dillon said the message to not come to the emergency room is a hard one for hospitals to give because hospitals feel an obligation to treat anyone who walks through their doors.
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