LEWISBURG – It’s a ‘welcome relief’ at Evangelical Community Hospital, now that the omicron COVID-19 surge is winding down. Even with global concern about the ba.2 variant, President and CEO Kendra Aucker believes community spread will stay low, “Hopefully it’ll just continue to do this until it burns out and you occasionally see some cases but it’s nothing significant. So I’m going to take the high road and remain optimistic.”
Aucker says early studies have shown the ba.2 variant as more contagious, but not as dangerous. Meantime, she says the hospital staff is happy to have the break, “We’re trying to get people who haven’t had time off some proper rest and time away from the facility. So I would say the morale is pretty good, but people are exhausted. We are still challenged by staffing issues. We still have traveling nurses on site.”
This also means Evangelical is back to ‘operations as usual’ for now, “Our visitations restrictions are being lifted, we’re able to open up our OR’s again and run our surgical services, where we’re doing all the orthopaedic cases and all the other elective cases that we had to slow down on when our beds were being overtaken by COVID patients.”
Aucker says she’s hopeful the hospital will get to a point where treating future COVID patients becomes part of normal operations with proper infection control protocols in place. She says they’ve closed their test site along St. Mary’s Street but they are prepared to swing back into full COVID operations if necessary.
You can hear our full interview with Aucker in future editions of WKOK Sunrise next week.
