Charlie Callagan looked perfectly healthy sitting outside recently on his deck in the smoky summer air in the small Rogue Valley town of Merlin, in southern Oregon. But Callagan, 72, has a condition called multiple myeloma, a blood cancer of the bone marrow.

“It affects the immune system; it affects the bones,” he said. “I had a PET scan that described my bones as looking ‘kind of Swiss cheese-like.’”

Callagan is a retired National Park Service ranger. Fifty years ago, he served in Vietnam. This spring, doctors identified his cancer as one of those linked to exposure to Agent Orange, the defoliant used during the war.

In recent years, Callagan has consulted maps showing hot spots where Agent Orange was sprayed in Vietnam.

“It turns out the airbase I was in was surrounded,” he said. “They sprayed all over.”

A few weeks ago, Callagan was driving the nearly four-hour trek to Oregon Health & Science University in Portland for a , a major procedure that would have required him to stay in the hospital for a week and remain in the Portland area for tests for an additional two weeks. On the way, he got a call from his doctor.

“They’re like, ‘We were told this morning that we have to cancel the surgeries we had planned,’” he said.

Callagan’s surgery was canceled because the hospital was full. That’s the story at many hospitals in Oregon and where they’ve been patients.

OHSU spokesperson said the hospital, which is the state’s only public and serves patients from across the region, has had to postpone numerous surgeries and procedures in the wake of the delta surge of the pandemic. “Surgical postponements initially impacted patients who needed an overnight hospital stay, but more recently has impacted all outpatient surgeries and procedures,” Robinson wrote.

Callagan said his bone marrow transplant has not yet been rescheduled. 

Such delays can have consequences, according to, who leads the oncology clinic handling Callagan’s care.

“With cancer treatment, sometimes there’s a window of opportunity where you can go in and potentially cure the patient,” Rizvi said. “If you wait too long, the cancer can spread. And that can affect prognosis and can make a potentially curable disease incurable.”

Such high stakes for delaying treatment at hospitals right now extends beyond cancer care.

“I’ve seen patients get ready to have their open-heart surgery that day. I’ve seen patients have brain tumor with visual changes, or someone with lung cancer, and their procedures are canceled that day and they have to come back another day,” said , a cardiologist and co-director of the regional cardiac center in Medford, Oregon. “You always hope they come back.”

In early September, Dauterman said, the local hospital had 28 patients who were waiting for open-heart surgery, 24 who needed pacemakers, and 22 who were awaiting lung surgeries. During normal times, he said, there is no wait.

“I don’t want to be dramatic — it’s just there’s plenty of other things killing Oregonians before this,” Dauterman said.

Right now, the vast majority of patients in Oregon hospitals with covid are unvaccinated, about five times as many as those who got the vaccine, according to the Oregon Health Authority. Covid infections are starting to decline from the peak of the delta wave. But even in non-pandemic times, there’s not a lot of extra room in Oregon’s health care system.

“If you look at the number of hospital beds per capita, Oregon has population. That’s the lowest in the country,” said , CEO of the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems.

focused on curtailing nonemergency procedures looked back at how Veterans Health Administration hospitals did during the first pandemic wave. It found that the VA health system was able to reduce elective treatments by 91%.

It showed that stopping elective procedures was an effective tool to free up beds in intensive care units to care for covid patients. But the study didn’t look at the consequences for those patients who had to wait.

“We clearly, even in hindsight, made the right decision of curtailing elective surgery,” said , a professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the study’s lead author. “But we as a society have not really emphatically asked the question ‘At what price in the long term?’”

He said they won’t know that without more long-term research.

At his home in southern Oregon, Charlie Callagan said he doesn’t consider his bone-marrow transplant as urgent as what some people are facing right now.

“There’s so many other people who are being affected,” he said. “People are dying waiting for a hospital bed. That just angers me. It’s hard to stay quiet now.”

He said it’s hard to be sympathetic for the covid patients filling up hospitals, when a simple vaccine could have prevented most of those hospitalizations.

This story is from a reporting partnership that includes , and . 

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-industry/covid-overwhelmed-hospitals-postpone-cancer-care-and-other-treatment/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

It is one of three hospitals Asante owns in the region. All three ICUs are 100% full of covid patients, according to staff members.  

“We’ve had two deaths today. So, it’s a very grim, difficult time,” Dr. Michael Blumhardt, medical director of the hospital’s intensive care unit, said on a recent Tuesday in August. “The delta virus is passing through the region like a buzzsaw.”

Unlike earlier covid waves, he said, patients are in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.

“We’re seeing clusters of families being admitted. We had a father and an adult daughter admitted to the intensive care unit and he passed away. Right before, I had to put the daughter on life support,” he said. 

Overall, vaccination rates in many states look pretty good. Oregon and California both have vaccination rates above the national average. But zoom in on any state, and you’ll see a checkerboard effect with huge differences among counties. In Oregon, around big-city Portland, two-thirds of all residents are fully vaccinated. But rural counties aren’t even close to that. Jackson County, on the California border, has the largest number of unvaccinated individuals in Oregon. That’s pushing hospitals to their limits. 

Blumhardt blames the current surge on the delta variant, but also a widespread rejection of the vaccine. 

“This is far more severe for this region than the prior covid waves,” he said.

Inside the Asante ICU, Chelsea Orr, a registered nurse, closely monitors patients, “just trying to keep people alive,” she said. “We’re taking care of a lot of ventilated patients here that are super sick.” 

What feels different about this stage of the pandemic, she said, is the incredible loss of life: “We’re working harder than we’ve ever worked before and still losing.” 

Down the hallway, Justin McCoy waited outside another patient’s isolation room. “I’ve been an ICU nurse for 10 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” McCoy said. “It’s really terrible seeing these patients who can’t breathe. That is a very difficult thing to watch. It’s really terrifying for them, and it’s really difficult for us to see day in and day out.”  

Blumhardt said the vast majority of their covid patients are unvaccinated.

“We admit nine unvaccinated to every one vaccinated individual. So clearly the vaccine is protecting against hospital admission,” he said. 

Jackson County has been seeing record numbers of new covid infections. Within weeks, many of those people may need hospital care — and a new forecast from Oregon Health & Science University predicts that by Labor Day the state will face a shortfall of 400 to 500 staffed hospital beds. 

Blumhardt said smaller hospitals in Oregon are trying to transfer their sickest patients to Asante, but so far they’ve had to decline around 200 people because of lack of space.

Even though Asante has already postponed some surgeries, staffers are simply worn out, said emergency room physician Dr. Courtney Wilson. 

“I think people are frustrated,” Wilson said. “It feels discouraging that we have had a vaccine available for a really long time in this community and we have a really low vaccination rate here.”

Oregon Democratic Gov. Kate Brown recently sent National Guard troops to overwhelmed counties, to help with nonmedical tasks, including about 150 soldiers to southern Oregon. Medical leaders at Asante and another local hospital system, Providence, have asked for the state to set up a 300-bed field hospital. 

“I don’t know how we’re going to get everybody taken care of. That’s the bottom line. We’re all hands on deck at every level of the organization,” Blumhardt said. 

Residents of Jackson County are starting to respond to the crisis. The rate of new vaccinations here has grown to about twice that of the Portland area. But thousands of people still need to be vaccinated to catch up.

This story is part of a partnership that includes ,  and KHN.

This <a target="_blank" href="/public-health/covid-delta-surge-oregon-california-border-counties-overwhelms-hospitals/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Charlie Callagan looked perfectly healthy sitting outside recently on his deck in the smoky summer air in the small Rogue Valley town of Merlin, in southern Oregon. But Callagan, 72, has a condition called multiple myeloma, a blood cancer of the bone marrow.

“It affects the immune system; it affects the bones,” he said. “I had a PET scan that described my bones as looking ‘kind of Swiss cheese-like.’”

Callagan is a retired National Park Service ranger. Fifty years ago, he served in Vietnam. This spring, doctors identified his cancer as one of those linked to exposure to Agent Orange, the defoliant used during the war.

In recent years, Callagan has consulted maps showing hot spots where Agent Orange was sprayed in Vietnam.

“It turns out the airbase I was in was surrounded,” he said. “They sprayed all over.”

A few weeks ago, Callagan was driving the nearly four-hour trek to Oregon Health & Science University in Portland for a , a major procedure that would have required him to stay in the hospital for a week and remain in the Portland area for tests for an additional two weeks. On the way, he got a call from his doctor.

“They’re like, ‘We were told this morning that we have to cancel the surgeries we had planned,’” he said.

Callagan’s surgery was canceled because the hospital was full. That’s the story at many hospitals in Oregon and where they’ve been patients.

OHSU spokesperson said the hospital, which is the state’s only public and serves patients from across the region, has had to postpone numerous surgeries and procedures in the wake of the delta surge of the pandemic. “Surgical postponements initially impacted patients who needed an overnight hospital stay, but more recently has impacted all outpatient surgeries and procedures,” Robinson wrote.

Callagan said his bone marrow transplant has not yet been rescheduled. 

Such delays can have consequences, according to, who leads the oncology clinic handling Callagan’s care.

“With cancer treatment, sometimes there’s a window of opportunity where you can go in and potentially cure the patient,” Rizvi said. “If you wait too long, the cancer can spread. And that can affect prognosis and can make a potentially curable disease incurable.”

Such high stakes for delaying treatment at hospitals right now extends beyond cancer care.

“I’ve seen patients get ready to have their open-heart surgery that day. I’ve seen patients have brain tumor with visual changes, or someone with lung cancer, and their procedures are canceled that day and they have to come back another day,” said , a cardiologist and co-director of the regional cardiac center in Medford, Oregon. “You always hope they come back.”

In early September, Dauterman said, the local hospital had 28 patients who were waiting for open-heart surgery, 24 who needed pacemakers, and 22 who were awaiting lung surgeries. During normal times, he said, there is no wait.

“I don’t want to be dramatic — it’s just there’s plenty of other things killing Oregonians before this,” Dauterman said.

Right now, the vast majority of patients in Oregon hospitals with covid are unvaccinated, about five times as many as those who got the vaccine, according to the Oregon Health Authority. Covid infections are starting to decline from the peak of the delta wave. But even in non-pandemic times, there’s not a lot of extra room in Oregon’s health care system.

“If you look at the number of hospital beds per capita, Oregon has population. That’s the lowest in the country,” said , CEO of the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems.

focused on curtailing nonemergency procedures looked back at how Veterans Health Administration hospitals did during the first pandemic wave. It found that the VA health system was able to reduce elective treatments by 91%.

It showed that stopping elective procedures was an effective tool to free up beds in intensive care units to care for covid patients. But the study didn’t look at the consequences for those patients who had to wait.

“We clearly, even in hindsight, made the right decision of curtailing elective surgery,” said , a professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the study’s lead author. “But we as a society have not really emphatically asked the question ‘At what price in the long term?’”

He said they won’t know that without more long-term research.

At his home in southern Oregon, Charlie Callagan said he doesn’t consider his bone-marrow transplant as urgent as what some people are facing right now.

“There’s so many other people who are being affected,” he said. “People are dying waiting for a hospital bed. That just angers me. It’s hard to stay quiet now.”

He said it’s hard to be sympathetic for the covid patients filling up hospitals, when a simple vaccine could have prevented most of those hospitalizations.

This story is from a reporting partnership that includes , and . 

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-industry/covid-overwhelmed-hospitals-postpone-cancer-care-and-other-treatment/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

It is one of three hospitals Asante owns in the region. All three ICUs are 100% full of covid patients, according to staff members.  

“We’ve had two deaths today. So, it’s a very grim, difficult time,” Dr. Michael Blumhardt, medical director of the hospital’s intensive care unit, said on a recent Tuesday in August. “The delta virus is passing through the region like a buzzsaw.”

Unlike earlier covid waves, he said, patients are in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.

“We’re seeing clusters of families being admitted. We had a father and an adult daughter admitted to the intensive care unit and he passed away. Right before, I had to put the daughter on life support,” he said. 

Overall, vaccination rates in many states look pretty good. Oregon and California both have vaccination rates above the national average. But zoom in on any state, and you’ll see a checkerboard effect with huge differences among counties. In Oregon, around big-city Portland, two-thirds of all residents are fully vaccinated. But rural counties aren’t even close to that. Jackson County, on the California border, has the largest number of unvaccinated individuals in Oregon. That’s pushing hospitals to their limits. 

Blumhardt blames the current surge on the delta variant, but also a widespread rejection of the vaccine. 

“This is far more severe for this region than the prior covid waves,” he said.

Inside the Asante ICU, Chelsea Orr, a registered nurse, closely monitors patients, “just trying to keep people alive,” she said. “We’re taking care of a lot of ventilated patients here that are super sick.” 

What feels different about this stage of the pandemic, she said, is the incredible loss of life: “We’re working harder than we’ve ever worked before and still losing.” 

Down the hallway, Justin McCoy waited outside another patient’s isolation room. “I’ve been an ICU nurse for 10 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” McCoy said. “It’s really terrible seeing these patients who can’t breathe. That is a very difficult thing to watch. It’s really terrifying for them, and it’s really difficult for us to see day in and day out.”  

Blumhardt said the vast majority of their covid patients are unvaccinated.

“We admit nine unvaccinated to every one vaccinated individual. So clearly the vaccine is protecting against hospital admission,” he said. 

Jackson County has been seeing record numbers of new covid infections. Within weeks, many of those people may need hospital care — and a new forecast from Oregon Health & Science University predicts that by Labor Day the state will face a shortfall of 400 to 500 staffed hospital beds. 

Blumhardt said smaller hospitals in Oregon are trying to transfer their sickest patients to Asante, but so far they’ve had to decline around 200 people because of lack of space.

Even though Asante has already postponed some surgeries, staffers are simply worn out, said emergency room physician Dr. Courtney Wilson. 

“I think people are frustrated,” Wilson said. “It feels discouraging that we have had a vaccine available for a really long time in this community and we have a really low vaccination rate here.”

Oregon Democratic Gov. Kate Brown recently sent National Guard troops to overwhelmed counties, to help with nonmedical tasks, including about 150 soldiers to southern Oregon. Medical leaders at Asante and another local hospital system, Providence, have asked for the state to set up a 300-bed field hospital. 

“I don’t know how we’re going to get everybody taken care of. That’s the bottom line. We’re all hands on deck at every level of the organization,” Blumhardt said. 

Residents of Jackson County are starting to respond to the crisis. The rate of new vaccinations here has grown to about twice that of the Portland area. But thousands of people still need to be vaccinated to catch up.

This story is part of a partnership that includes ,  and KHN.

This <a target="_blank" href="/public-health/covid-delta-surge-oregon-california-border-counties-overwhelms-hospitals/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">