As many as 100 federal health care workers could be on their way to Wisconsin to help address staffing shortages as hospitals across the state once again have been inundated with COVID-19 patients, Department of Health Services Secretary-designee Karen Timberlake said Wednesday.
The staffers, who would be deployed in teams of 20 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would “be dispersed around the state and will add important capacity, especially in intensive care units,” Timberlake said.
While the exact timetable for the workers’ arrival remains unclear, Timberlake told reporters during a press briefing that she expects “we are talking about a matter of weeks, not months, before those resources will be available to us.”
“The real strategy here is to use those staff strategically to make sure that we can free up capacity in our ICUs,” Timberlake said of the additional staff.
That added capacity is needed, as numerous health systems across the state have reported shortages of available intensive care unit beds. Statewide, roughly 97% of ICU beds at hospitals are currently occupied, according to data from the Wisconsin Hospital Association. Only 37 ICU beds were available in the state as of Tuesday.
Timberlake and DHS Chief Medical Officer Ryan Westergaard said the vast majority of patients currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated. They also pointed to a recent surge in cases — 3,519 additional cases were confirmed Wednesday — as a cause of the dramatic increase in hospitalizations.
“We have not seen this level of disease activity since December 2020,” Timberlake said — before the widespread availability of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines.
Westergaard also said there have been three additional confirmed cases of the Omicron variant in Wisconsin. He noted that not all of the new positive cases involve people who were traveling, which implies that there has been community spread of the new variant in the state.
However, he said, “more than 99%” of cases in Wisconsin are still the Delta variant. He urged Wisconsinites to get vaccinated, continue to wear masks, isolate if they’re feeling sick and get tested to help fight the spread of the virus.
