WISCONSIN— Across Wisconsin, there continues to be a limited number of intensive care unit beds, and COVID-19 is partly to blame. However, there's more going on behind the scenes.

For starters, some Wisconsin hospital systems are losing employees because of pandemic burnout and some employees are going to other hospitals for new opportunities.

JJ Vega is a registered nurse who at an emergency room in southeast Wisconsin; he has seen first hand the added pressures inside his ER.

"Most ERs are established to see 80 patients a day and right now we are seeing 140 each day," Vega said while on the campus of Gateway Technical College.

Vega graduated from Gateway Technical College in December and had a job waiting for him when he graduated, partially due to high demand for nurses. 

That nursing staffing shortage isn't helping matters in intensice care units and emergency rooms.

"In different parts of Wisconsin the ability to have enough ICU providers, particularly, nursing providers with the nursing shortage does not help. There may be places in Wisconsin with an ICU bed that has a clean sheet on it but they don't have the staff to run it," said Dr. Jeff Pothof, UW Health's chief quality officer. 

The overcrowding in hospital systems includes other issues that caused the bottleneck.

For instance, some patients put off primary care appoinments during the pandemic, and now their health requires longer hospitalization.

"This is leading to a backup including your walk-in clinics, emergency rooms or your in-patient setting," Vega said. 

And then, of course, there's those who contract COVID-19 and need to be hospitalized.

"COVID can be the straw that breaks the camel's back and ends up sending patients down a much different route that causes them to become even more sick," Vega said. 

When it comes to ICU beds, most health officials agreed the beds have always been crowded but COVID-19 is not helping things. 

"ICUs [were crowded] even before COVID ran at high rates, but for the most part things worked and you could find an ICU bed available somewhere in the area," Pothof said. "But the addition of COVID-19 and those patients that are taking the block of ICU beds makes it not work out all the time."