The Ohio National Guard was called in on Friday to help hospitals with the surge of COVID-19 cases.
The influx of COVID-19 patients is causing strain on hospital staff, according to DeWine.
The number of hospitalized patients is approaching an all-time high, and this is the highest number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 this year.
He said the rise in COVID-19 hospitalization has forced some hospitals to delay surgeries, transfer patients to other hospitals, and implement crisis standards of care, where staff have to resort to atypical procedures like use post- surgical units as an intensive care room.
The Guard troops, which include 150 medical professionals, could arrive as soon as Monday, according to DeWine. The other 900 personnel will help with things like patient transport.
During the press conference, DeWine said that their concern was about beds, about space. Today, it is about personnel.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that as of Thursday, 98% of the medical-surgical beds in the 40 hospitals in 14 counties around Cincinnati were full.
Extra fridge trucks are being brought in by some hospitals for extra capacity.
Tiffany Mattingly, vice president of clinical strategies at the Health Collaborative, told The Enquirer that the hospitals have become fantastic at managing this and taking the brunt of the pain internally to make sure the community gets quality care.
At this point in the surge, all indications are that it will be worse than we've seen so far. It's a dire situation.
The Omicron variant is highly transmissible and is spreading ahead of the holiday season. According to data, cases of the variant are doubling every two days, and public health officials are anticipating another wave of infections. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects over 1 million cases to be detected in the week leading up to Christmas.
Early data suggests that Omicron causes milder cases, similar to cold for those who are fully vaccine and boosted.
The people who are the most sick are the people who are unvaccinated, but we are getting more and more people who have been vaccined.
The surge could put US hospitals in the same situation as they were at the start of the Pandemic, according to Faheem Younus, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Maryland.
