Tennessee hospitals may have seen the worst of the delta surge. Even the largest hospitals in the eastern part of the state are experiencing a week-long decline in COVID patients.
Hospitalizations have tended to follow spikes in new COVID cases. And that has held true as the delta variant swept from west to east across Tennessee.
Statewide, hospitalizations seem to have peaked Sept. 9 and fallen below 3,000. So now, at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, there’s been a week of declines. Same is true for Ballad Health in northeast Tennessee, despite projections that the surge would continue through the end of the month.
“This amount of decrease over a week is certainly not something we expected, particularly considering we didn’t even necessarily think we were at our peak a week ago,” says Dr. James Shamiyeh, UTMC’s chief operating officer. “We don’t yet know if it’s realistic to expect that kind of decline will continue.”
The decline also isn’t explained by patients dying in the hospital, he says, but rather a drop in COVID admissions as well. Still, the hospitals describe the elevated numbers as “alarming.”
Shamiyeh warns that COVID has proven to be unpredictable and that anyone who has so far refused the vaccine should take it to protect the community against another surge. The vast majority of COVID hospitalizations remain among the unvaccinated.
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