It was a Tuesday afternoon in mid-December at Beaumont Hospital in Farmington Hills. Inside, dozens of people were alone in rooms with closed doors, hooked up to oxygen tanks and IV medicine, sickened by the virus that came to define 2020.
Every room in the south pavilion of the 20-bed progressive care unit was full. Half of the beds were occupied with coronavirus patients. The other half were filled with people who’d had heart attacks or strokes or other conditions that led them to seek hospital care.
“It’s very stressful,” said Hassan Beydoun, a registered nurse and assistant manager of the unit, which is filled with patients who aren’t quite sick enough to need intensive care, but who need more attention than those in general care units. “It’s scary, to be honest with you, because I don’t feel like people know what’s going on exactly in the hospitals. And I feel like some people just don’t care, you know?”
Despite statewide public health orders requiring masks, limiting large gatherings, and prohibiting dine-in eating at restaurants and bars, “people are still gathering,” said Beydoun, 43, of Dearborn Heights.
Though all the rooms were full at the hospital, he said the latest surge of Michigan COVID-19 hospitalizations had begun to ease. Still, Beydoun said he worries that the pandemic is far from over, and he and his co-workers could find themselves in crisis mode again — especially in the weeks after Christmas get-togethers and New Year’s celebrations.
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Source: Detroit Free Press
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