DANVILLE – President and CEO of Geisinger Dr. Jaewon Ryu says hospital capacity is not only a space issue, it’s also a staffing issue.
During a media briefing Friday, Dr. Ryu was asked about a recent tweet from Governor Tom Wolf saying Pennsylvania will run out ICU beds this month. Dr. Ryu says all the indicators they are seeing agree, “That’s exactly why we want to focus on preventing upstream, but if the question is ‘do we think that we’re going to come up on capacity issues due to COVID activity in the hospitals,’ I would say absolutely, yes.”
But despite the increased cases of COVID-19 recently, Dr. Ryu says Geisinger is managing pretty well, “I always compare it to, almost like an airplane pilot with all the dials. We have a lot of people working on a lot of dials, on an hourly basis, and I think that’s really helped us to battle through this. But, even more reason why we could do without the additional challenges, especially the ones that can be prevented.”
Dr. Ryu also says they’ve learned how to be predictive with data since the start of the pandemic and the next few weeks aren’t looking good, “They will be busy. There will be a lot of cases coming into the hospital because all of the leading indicators suggest that that will be the case.”
Geisinger says over the past two weeks, they are averaging 31 new COVID-positive admissions a day.
You can hear the full briefing from Dr. Ryu on the WKOK Podcast page.
