PHOENIX — The Arizona Department of Health Services is reporting only 11% of ICU beds are currently available in Arizona.
The statistics are leaving frontline workers feeling the pressure of treating the sickest of COVID-19 patients.
“It’s been kind of scary, it’s been overwhelming as well,” Neva Farmer, a Valley ICU nurse said.
Farmer, a registered nurse, works at a local hospital. Since people in Arizona began getting sick with the coronavirus, she’s been seeing them in her ICU.
“In the last two weeks we went from having two floors that were COVID positive to now having four,” Farmer said. “And we’re potentially opening a fifth unit. So every week it’s just increasing exponentially.”
Farmer says the patients are difficult to treat. Many of them not only are sick with the coronavirus, but are dealing with other underlying conditions, and now her patients are getting younger.
“Someone who’s in their 30s and 40s usually they don’t have a lot of underlying conditions. And we’re seeing them be very, very sick and have a very long recovery process,” Farmer said. “Our patients that are in the ICU they’re in the ICU for two, three, four weeks. I think we’ve had some that are five or six weeks on a ventilator. That’s a very long process.”
As days go by, more and more Arizonans are learning they’ve contracted the virus too.
“I love what I do but I am very scared that maybe one day I’ll be bringing it home to my child,” Farmer said.
Her message to Arizonans is to take the pandemic seriously.
“This is very real, and this is very much a threat to everyone’s health,” Farmer said.
While she continues to fight COVID-19, she knows it’s long from over.
“If people continue to get infected and get worse we eventually will run out of beds, there’s no doubt about that,” Farmer said. “And that’s a really scary thing to consider and a really hard thing as a healthcare provider to know that we won’t be able to care for them.”