Hospitals in Carlton County Meet to ‘Crisis Plan’ as COVID Continues Surging

Crisis planning is to prepare the hospitals, and make a course of action in case they become overwhelmed and have to send patients elsewhere.

CLOQUET, Minn. — Doctors from the Community Memorial Hospital met on Thursday to “crisis plan”, concerned that the latest surge of the Omicron variant might overwhelm medical facilities.

Crisis planning is to prepare the hospitals, and make a course of action in case they become overwhelmed and have to send patients elsewhere.

But with so many medical facilities bogged down with increasing numbers of patients and on top of that, staff shortages, hospitals are trying to plan ahead.

“It’s already very difficult to transfer anybody to a bigger hospital, and I think it’s only going to get worse and so were planning on how were going to manage that. Were tight, our staffing is tight just like everybody, were planning for the fact that more of our staff might be out because they’re on quarantine or they have covid,” Charles Kendall, Incident Commander for the Community Memorial Hospital Covid Response Team said.

Doctor Kendall says even fully vaccinated, you can still get and spread covid, but it reduces the potential of being hospitalized and having to go on a ventilator by a much larger rate.

And he continues to urge people to get vaccinated, as he believes we are at the peak of the covid crisis.

“We’ve had some tough situations recently where we’ve put people on ventilators and it took a couple of days to find them a place. We’re reaching maybe the most critical phase of this whole pandemic in the medical world,” Kendall said.

The community memorial hospital in Cloquet plans to team up with other regional hospitals if the time comes, to help give care to patients who need it.