Health-care workers suffer the risk of infection as Covid cases across the Midwest continue to spread, according to Dr. Penny Wheeler.
In an interview with CNBC, Dr. Wheeler, head of Minneapolis-based Allina Health, said that the not-for-profit health network owns more personal protective equipment, ventilators, and beds to accommodate Covid-19 patients than it had during the first surge in the spring. However, she admitted that nurses and doctors are harder to come by.
“You cannot manufacture a talented and compassionate caregiver,” Wheeler told “Squawk on the Street.” “And that’s where we’re having trouble with now, especially with so many of them being affected or their family members being affected by community spread in our organization and in the community.”
Wheeler emphasized the importance of taking public health protocols seriously as those can ease coronavirus transmission in the community. Doing so minimizes the likelihood of health-care workers becoming sick, she noted.
“The need for masking, physical distancing, and washing of hands, all those things — I know people are fatigued but so are the health-care workers, and you can keep our health-care workers healthier and able to care for you if you do those things,” Wheeler stressed. “These are incredibly skilled people, and you can’t replace them.”
Health-care workers in Minnesota
Minnesota is among the 25 states that posted record-high hospitalizations for coronavirus patients, based on a seven-day average, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the COVID Tracking Project. Minnesota is one of eight states where Covid-19 deaths are at all-time highs, with 48 patients on average dying per day in the last week, based on CNBC’s analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.
Hopkins data revealed that 3,297 people in Minnesota have died from Covid-19 during the pandemic.
Wheeler’s concerns about staffing are also the same elsewhere in the country, especially in some of Minnesota’s nearby states. “Our geography in the Midwest, upper Midwest, has been seeing unprecedented numbers of infections and case growth,” she said.
Meanwhile, the head of the University of Wisconsin’s health network told CNBC that its seven-hospital system was “short of staff all times, either because they have Covid or they have some other illness and we need to rule out Covid before we bring them back to work.”
“There is no surplus staff to deploy to other hospitals to help each other out, so we’re trying to equal the load. We’re all trying to keep patients local,” UW Health CEO Dr. Alan Kaplan said.
Wheeler considers the positive news about Covid-19 vaccines a “wonderful ray of hope,” but the availability of those vaccines is still some time away.
“We just have to hold on ... so let’s take what is in our control — mask up, physical distance, wash your hands,” Wheeler said. “We can take that, and then we can bridge that to a time where there’s greater hope in the vaccines in the offing, then we’ll be doing a great service and we’ll have more lives here than lost.”
