but we re still seeing a lot of covid admissions. regardless, both of those groups of patients must be cared for with isolation to protect the health care workers and other patients. if you go to our emergency room, it s full. there are people in the hallways, there are people in all of the emergency department rooms waiting to find beds upstairs in the hospital primarily because some of the staffing issues that we have with both infections, quarantine and then just a reduced workforce. other than joe scarborough just waiting it out because in new york the numbers are going down, california, is there something that you could get right now, something that you need right now to prevent an even worse crisis in your state s hospitals. the big thing we have been promoting is asking the public to avoid using the emergency room if you don t have a you true emergency. don t come in for tests, do things like that. help us unclog the emergency departments. we are really promoting
there appears to be hopeful news in the united kingdom. the u.k. health agency says data suggests omicron patients are 50% to 70% less likely to require hospitalization than those with delta. the fda today authorized a second covid pill for emergency use. this one from merck. in patients who are at high risk for covid-19 complications, there was a 30% reduction in the risk of hospitalizations and deaths. reporter: that s less effective than pfizer s pill, but an additional tool as delta devastates hospitals. we have seen so many deaths. reporter: doctors and nurses simply can t keep pace with the crushing wave of new patients flooding through their doors right now. we re treating patients in the lobby, in the hallway. we have patients waiting hours and days for beds upstairs. reporter: having already eclipsed delta s surge, some believe omicron could
department, 75 to 80% of our beds are full of patients that are waiting for beds upstairs and that makes it incredibly hard to do the work of emergency medicine, which is on a day-to-day basis a life-and-death business. um, it s overwhelming. and it s incredibly stressful. and and it s hard on patients and it s hard on our community. yeah. especially, two years in. having your hospital get crushed, again, even as we have vaccines. that must be just really hard to face, dr. zimmer. yeah, you know, i think that s the part that s the most frustrating is that, for the most part, the patients that we re still seeing with covid which currently are occupying almost a third of our hospital, um, and over, you know, 3,000 of the hospital beds in indiana right now most all of them are unvaccinated, particularly in the icus and that part of it
the chief administrate officer of mercy hospital, springfield. thank you for being with us. i have been following your twitter updates, the updates you have been giving on the hospital and the patients there. what does your covid unit look like now? thank you for having me. i do appreciate it. today as of right now we have 122 covid positive patients in the hospital, about 20 of those are currently in the emergency room waiting for placement in beds upstairs. our plan allowed us to open multiple units based on acuity. we have two units serving icu level patients, one of those is full with 28 of those patients on covid, 24 are ventilated and then we have several stepdown units and we have capacity on the medical unit as well we can move patients on and off. it takes a lot of work to move those patients around and make adjustments to make sure we have capacity to care for the patients. 122. if i am following this correctly, and you can correct me if i m wrong, that s a new record for
this pole in the base. his two daughters tied to the beds upstairs. all of them tortured all night. william could hear his family being tortured upstairs. i heard the moaning and the thumps, he testified. somehow bleeding from his head, he managed to escape, his feel still bound, petit hopped out of the house and made it to the neighbor s house for help. the suspects raped and strangled jennifer petit and burned the house down. the mother and her two daughters were all killed. this has been such an emotional trial. the evidence here so incredibly gruesome that four jurors, even in the first week of this trial, have already been dismissed. one of them said he couldn t follow the evidence because it was so confusing. some of the jurors were sobbing. the petit family was sobbing in court. william petit did himself. just a couple moments ago he did