BOISE, Idaho — On Tuesday morning, healthcare workers from across Idaho discussed the COVID-19 case and hospitalization increase throughout the state.
During this meeting, Dr. Steven Nemerson, Chief Clinical Officer at Saint Alphonsus, said the situation has reached the point where some emergency surgeries may have to wait.
Just a state away, Utah hospitals predict they are about a week or two away from rationing care.
These facilities have created a list of criteria for doctors to utilize if they are forced to decide who can stay in an overcrowded hospital or intensive care unit (ICU).
Based on hospitalization rates reported by the Idaho Dept. of Health and Welfare, Gem State hospitals could soon face this reality.
There is already a crisis standard of care plan in place that prioritizes who should be the first to receive care in a crisis situation. Children are first, then pregnant women, young adults- 18 to 40 being the priority-, healthcare providers, and finally, a lottery.
This prioritization is very concerning to those who work with the elderly and those with disabilities, such as Boise attorney Charlene Quade, who calls herself an "incubated advocate".
Quade's father ran the largest institution for people with developmental disabilities in Minnesota while she ran a group home for impaired adults in the 1980s. She also investigated abuse and neglect cases.
Her daughter, Rachel, has William's Syndrom, a rare neuor-developmental disorder.
When she was diagnosed, Quade decided to educate herself further on special education. She went back to law school at 42 years old, graduating in 2003 and moving to Idaho in 2004.
Quade said she paid attention when COVID-19 hit Wuhan, China in 2019 because she knew it was going to have an effect on her clients and family.
It was this reason that she reached out to Idaho Gov. Brad Little's office in April.
"What I think that we're facing is a values clarification in our society," Quade said. "I think that we have been able to perceive ourselves as being able to have our, more or less, libertarian ideas that we can do what we want to do, how we want to do it, and we're always going to have our great healthcare. It's never going to be denied, we don't have to have socialized medicine."
Her concern is that healthcare may not be so readily available in the coming weeks.
"We are coming to a crisis point in this COVID situation where we are going to be rationing services and who is going to get it and who isn't," she said. "It's a philosophical discussion, lovely. But right now it's our reality."
As a parent of a child with a disability, the idea of placing the least amount of importance on the elderly and those with disabilities is a daunting prospect to Quade.
"I run the gamut from fear, frustration, anger. I become judgemental of the people who didn't practice social distancing, perhaps didn't practice some of the things that we have known that have worked," she said. "I get really, really angry, but then I also become very sad, because if I lost my daughter to this, as a result of society's inability to deal with it in a way that I believe it could've been, should've been at the start, I can't even explain the helplessness that I might feel at that point."
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