Hospital officials say workers are burned out from fighting relentless COVID

Two weeks after an alarming news conference where hospital officials essentially said the state was heading to a very bad place with COVID hospitalizations, the situation has not improved much. On Monday, hospital officials told reporters that while hospitalizations were perhaps plateauing, it’s a long way from getting back to normal operations. Taya Briley, executive vice president of the Washington State Hospital Association, said, “Things are still very bad. This week we have 16,173, COVID hospitalizations compared to last week’s number of 16,174. We are in the midst of the worst peak of COVID cases that we have experienced since the beginning.”

For comparison, “before this highly contagious Delta variant arrived ... we were averaging just about 350 cases in June and in early July,” Briley said.