General update: Since yesterday, Shelby County’s Covid positivity rate increased to 14%. We are rapidly trending toward the “red” status.

Inpatient unit: All forty of our beds remain occupied on our 3^rd floor inpatient unit. The ACC inpatient unit is also full, plus we have begun using our Surgical Care beds for inpatient overflow. Some patients remained in the Emergency Department overnight because we did not have an inpatient bed available. Several surrounding hospitals are reporting inpatient bed and emergency department diversion due to increased volumes and staff shortages. MHP does not have any inpatient beds that are deemed unavailable due to staffing shortages. We have redeployed several members of our physician and nursing staff to other departments in order to deal with the current inpatient surge. MHP is no longer accepting critical care patient transfers from neighboring hospitals.

• We currently have sixteen critical care patients on the 3^rd floor and ten (63%) of those patients are due to Covid. Of the ten Covid-related critical care patients only one is vaccinated.
• We have nine patients on ventilators, plus three additional patients who are on Vapotherm or BiPap.
• Thirty-two (80%) of our inpatients are Covid positive and twenty-five (78%) of them are unvaccinated.

Emergency Department: We received eighty doses of Regeneron yesterday afternoon and have already begun administering doses to many of the eighty-seven patients on the waitlist. We received 102 doses of Regeneron today. We administered thirty-five patient infusions since yesterday with several more scheduled today and tomorrow.

The infusion drugs are the 2^nd best defense against severe Covid and hospitalization. The best defense remains being fully vaccinated/boosted. If you are not yet vaccinated, please consider it. If you are eligible for a vaccine booster, please schedule it. Due to supply shortages, we can no longer rely on having the infusion drugs readily available to keep Covid positive patients out of the hospital.

Get your Covid vaccine at MedWorks Pharmacy: MedWorks Pharmacy is offering the Pfizer vaccine and Pfizer booster, Johnson & Johnson vaccine and booster, as well as the Pediatric Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. We request patients call to schedule an appointment for the Pediatric dosing, which is available on Wednesdays and Fridays. Call 317-421-2020 to schedule an appointment. All the other vaccines can be scheduled on the MHP website or by calling MedWorks directly. https://www.mymhp.org/news-media/categories/covid-19-updates/ We accept walk-ins for the adult vaccines as well.