COLUMBUS — Ohio's hospital capacity improved slightly this past week with more available medical-surgical beds.
Eye on Ohio reported 1,193 available Med/Surg beds across the state on Sept. 24, which is 339 more than what was reported seven days prior.
Meanwhile, capacity within ICUs continues to hold steady as COVID-19 infections accounted for 22% of all admissions.
Lucia Walinchus, executive director for Eye on Ohio, discussed some of the challenges healthcare workers are dealing with.
"You know, they can put two heart attack patients next to each other, but you can't really do that with COVID, so sometimes we have nurses spending three or four hours in any one room just because they have so many things that they have to do and to go out and even just go the bathroom or anything is an ordeal to take everything off," she said.
Previously, despite setting a record low of 224 available ICU beds on Sept. 10, another record was set on Sept. 17 as only 179 ICU beds were available.
Walinchus said throughout the last week, hospitals reported zero available ICU beds 874 times. The week prior, they did so 930 times.
Eye on Ohio fought the state for access to the number of available hospital beds and other equipment related to COVID-19. The organization filed a lawsuit in the Court of Claims of Ohio to obtain the requested information.
In Nov. 2020, Judge Patrick M. McGrath ruled the Ohio Department of Health must provide that data.
Click here to view the latest data from Eye on Ohio.
Eye on Ohio: Ohio Center for Journalism has tracked the number of available Med/Surg [regular] hospital beds as well as the number of beds within intensive care units throughout Ohio since the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.