RI Poised To Exceed Hospital Coronavirus Capacity In Days

PROVIDENCE, RI — Rhode Island is on its way to overwhelming hospital capacity and necessitating another across-the-board lockdown, Gov. Gina Raimondo said during her weekly news conference Thursday.

"These coming months will be the toughest of the virus," Raimondo said. "We are in a terrible spot. You should look at that [data] dashboard and be alarmed."

As of Thursday, there were 232 people in the state hospitalized with COVID-19, the highest total since May. That's also more than twice the amount just a few weeks ago, Raimondo said. With the current rate of hospitalizations, the state is on track to overwhelm hospital capacity in about three weeks, necessitating the opening of a field hospital in Cranston, she said.

Just 16 percent of the available hospital beds designated for coronavirus patients were available Thursday, Raimondo said. Once they are filled, hospitals will move to surge capacity plans, which will stretch the number of beds in the state to 600 and place an "enormous strain" on the health care system, she said. After that, the field hospital, which has 350 additional beds, will become operational.

Dr. Laura Forman, the head of emergency medicine at Kent Hospital and director of Cranston's field hospital, said the past few months have been "unlike anything [she'd] ever experienced in [her] career in this country."

"I implore you to re-evaluate your day-to-day actions," she said. "The need here is for prevention ... These interventions only work if each of us takes them to heart."

Forman spoke of her experiences in emergency medicine over the past months, describing how she and her colleagues have sat with the dying, alone, holding up a phone to allow a family member to say goodbye over video chat, or seeing the pain of those who suffer long-term side effects after recovering from the initial virus.

The only way Rhode Island will get the second wave of the pandemic under control is if every resident does everything they can to slow the spread, Raimondo said, which means wearing a mask at all time when with people outside their immediate household and "stop having social gatherings of any kind, period."

"It is still my hope that [the current restrictions] will be enough," she said. "But I'm not optimistic ... If everybody committed themselves to stopping these social gatherings, to wearing masks ... we would have the control to put a lid on this."

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