Despite continuing improvement in State wide hospitalizations and improving case numbers and percent positives, Exeter’s situation worsened since yesterday. Our overall census went up to over 90 this morning (we are licensed for 100 beds) and we started the day with 2 patients waiting in the ED for beds. ICU utilization dropped but our number of critical Covid patients increased. Our Covid census also increased for the second day in a row and is now hitting 17, up from a recent low of 8 last Thursday. We are hopeful that our numbers, and the experience of other hospitals on the NH Seacoast will follow the broader State-wide trend soon. Exeter continues operating under its Incident Command (IC), crisis response structure.
State wide numbers related to community spread are continuing to improve significantly, and they have now helped pull down the number of hospitalized Covid patients below 300 for the first time since mid-November 2021 which is also below the second peak we experienced in December 2020.
All of us at Exeter Health Resources want to thank everyone who has been involved in efforts to reduce the spread of Covid in the Community. While State wide numbers have improved significantly, they remain extremely high, well above thresholds for pandemic control. According to the State’s website we still have 40% of the NH population who are unvaccinated and therefore at serious risk from the virus. Therefore we strongly encourage our legislators, towns, schools and local businesses to continue to support masking, vaccinations, boosters, social distancing, handwashing and staying home when people are experiencing symptoms. All of us want to get the pandemic under control as quickly as possible and the worst thing we can do is pause our efforts too early and sacrifice the progress we are now clearly making.