Here’s Why Tennessee Is Concerned About Capacity At Children’s Hospitals

Tennessee has begun publicizing hospital capacity figures for children’s hospitals and pediatric COVID cases for the first time during the pandemic. The move is in response to a sharp rise in the state’s pediatric cases, which nearly doubled in one week to roughly 3,200.

“We are concerned at those pediatric numbers rising quickly,” Tennessee’s health commissioner, Dr. Lisa Piercey, said on a call with reporters Friday. “I can’t say I’m terribly surprised because that’s what our peer states are seeing, and I don’t really have any indication that it’s going to be a whole lot different here.”

Right now, there are only 27 pediatric COVID patients (children through age 17) in hospitals statewide. The figures will be updated daily here.

But Tennessee seems to be just a few weeks behind Arkansas and Louisiana, which have similarly low vaccination rates and where children’s hospitals now have more COVID patients than ever.

Children’s hospitals are already relatively full for this time of year because of a rare spike of other respiratory viruses usually seen in the winter time. And Piercey, who is a pediatrician, says children’s hospitals don’t have many places to turn when beds and nurses are running low because treating kids requires special training and equipment.

“We don’t have as much flexibility to flex our staff and to pull in additional staffing and pull all these extra levers like we did back in the winter when we had adult hospitals to fill up,” she says. “So that’s a concern.”

Schools also to report cases

The Tennessee Department of Education is also going to require school districts to share data on the prevalence of COVID in their classrooms, just as they did last year. The state did not plan to continue publishing the data until the recent surge.

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn says her staff will work through the weekend to determine exactly what stats will be required.

“Parents deserve to have that level of data about what’s happening in their schools and classrooms so they can make the best decision for their own children,” she said Friday.

The guidance should be sent to districts early next week, when most will have already started school for the year.

Only a handful of school systems are requiring students to wear masks. There has been no change in state-level guidance on masking amid the rise in pediatric cases, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly recommending universal masking in schools as the more contagious delta variant spreads.