A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter evacuated a 70-year-old Haines resident to Bartlett Regional Hospital a little before 3 a.m. on Tuesday, said Coast Guard spokesperson Kip Wadlow. The man was suffering from a severe case of COVID-19 when SEARHC called in the request at 10:30 p.m. on Monday for a Coast Guard medevac. It’s the first reported COVID-related evacuation of a Haines resident.
At 4:30 p.m. on Monday, the Haines Health Center requested that the Coast Guard transfer to Juneau a different coronavirus patient — a 46-year-old male. While an Air Station Sitka crew and two nurses with Guardian Flight, a commercial medevac service, worked through a checklist to prepare for the mission, they received another request from SEARHC: A 70-year-old male with COVID-19 also needed to be taken to Juneau for medical care.
After a series of conversations between the Coast Guard flight surgeon, Guardian nurses and Haines health workers, a decision was made to evacuate only the 70-year-old on the MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter. “The other person ended up not being medevaced because they were in more stable condition,” Wadlow said.
Wadlow said the clinic contacted commercial medevac services, which couldn’t fly at the time, on Monday. “Haines provides additional layers of complexity with the mountainous terrain and diverse weather,” Guardian Flight program director Doug Williams wrote in an email to the CVN. “The safety risk increases significantly during non-daylight hours of operation.” When Guardian’s turboprop plane can’t reach Haines, the Coast Guard might step in with a helicopter, as occurred Tuesday.
Only four of 57 total beds at Bartlett are vacant, according to the City and Borough of Juneau’s COVID-19 dashboard. The hospital is treating seven COVID-positive patients, but chief nursing officer Kim McDowell said that number can be misconstrued because it doesn’t account for patients who had COVID-19 and are being treated for long-term respiratory or cardiac issues but are no longer infectious.
McDowell said that Bartlett doesn’t have capacity to treat patients who need the highest level of care. For example, it doesn’t have a pulmonologist or trauma center. Treating COVID-19 is “not as simple as we’re just going to manage the lung issue,” McDowell said. “People have clotting issues and heart complications. They need a multi-disciplinary team to manage all the systems that may be failing. We don’t necessarily have that at Bartlett.”
In a worst-case scenario, Juneau health workers could stabilize a patient but would need to transfer him or her to Anchorage or Seattle. “Those being full also affects our ability to medevac patients there,” McDowell said.
Alaska had the highest daily new case rate in the nation last week, according to the New York Times. Alaska’s average rate of daily new infections is twice the national average. The state’s largest hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, is in crisis mode, having to ration care due to the influx of coronavirus patients and a staff shortage, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
Governor Mike Dunleavy activated crisis standards of care statewide on Wednesday. The measure provides decision-making framework for the state’s healthcare providers. Broadly, it means the state’s hospitals don’t have enough resources for the number of patients seeking care. The new care standards enable providers to make decisions, sometimes life-or-death ones, about which patients to prioritize for critical care, how many resources to allocate to patients and the option to deny treatment.
The governor also announced Wednesday that the state contracted 400 health care workers from the Lower 48 to assist Alaska with its response to the crisis.
“Our case counts are rising. This is concerning. It should be concerning to all of us. It’s impacting our hospitals greatly. It’s impacting our hospital capacity and the ability to get the care that you need,” Dunleavy said at a Wednesday press conference.
The Haines Borough Emergency Operations Center (EOC) announced two new cases in the borough on Tuesday, bringing the number of active cases to 28. There were 10 new cases over the weekend. The Tuesday announcement said there would be no updates for a week from the public health nurse, who provides information about recovered cases. The EOC will continue to receive updates from SEARHC about new cases.
Haines clinic administrator Stephanie Pattison declined to comment on the medevac, citing HIPAA law which is designed to protect patient anonymity. SEARHC spokesperson Maegan Bosak didn’t respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
The Coast Guard is often involved in non-maritime rescues, Wadlow said. But he is unsure of the number of times the Coast Guard has evacuated someone due to COVID-19. “This is the only one that comes to mind at least in the last month or so that I can recall involving someone who is COVID positive,” he said.
Interim manager Alekka Fullerton said although EOC members have asked, SEARHC is not informing the EOC on the number of Haines residents who have been evacuated due to COVID-19.
“We only learn about testing,” Fullerton said. “If people understood the seriousness of COVID cases in Haines it might change their behavior.”