As of Wednesday morning, Advocate Aurora hospitals had more than 1,700 inpatients, which is a record during this pandemic, said Dr. Robert Citronberg, executive medical director of infectious disease and prevention at Advocate Aurora Health.
"We have critical staffing shortages in large part right now due to the fact that at any given day we have several hundred of our team members who are out with COVID," he said. "So obviously our team members are not immune from it, so we are experiencing that as are health care systems around the country."
While he's starting to see a leveling off of the growth of cases in the hospitals, Citronberg said the number is still double what it was just a few weeks ago.
"Most of our sites are currently postponing elective procedures due to staffing shortages and the large number of patients in our hospitals with COVID, we simply don't have enough beds or enough people to take care of those patients and do it safely," he said.
Citronberg said he's hopeful that the surge will end soon and Advocate Aurora can resume normal operations.
