photo by: LMH Health

LMH Health, 325 Maine St., is pictured in May 2021.

Updated at 12:10 p.m. Wednesday

Lawrence Memorial Hospital has had its first patient death related to COVID since March, LMH’s board of trustees was told Wednesday morning.

“It is very hard to see this happening again,” Traci Hoopingarner, chief nursing officer and vice-president of clinical care, told board members.

Following the meeting, a spokeswoman for LMH Health said the death occurred on Wednesday. She said she could not provide further details, including age or vaccination status of the patient, because of privacy concerns.

Board members, though, were told that the strong majority of COVID patients at LMH have been unvaccinated. The hospital also has said the recent average age of COVID patients has been 48.

A good part of Wednesday’s meeting included pleas from board members and hospital leaders — with various degrees of frustration — for people to get vaccinated and also to wear masks.

“Think about someone other than yourself,” Bob Moody, chair of the LMH Board of Trustees, said, while acknowledging there are many people who can not get vaccinated for any number of medical or other reasons.

He asked community members to think about their family members, friends, grandchildren and others with whom they come in contact as they decide to not get vaccinated or not wear a mask.

“All of these people deserve to be considered as you wave off the science of this vaccine,” Moody said. “The blame for this continued pandemic has to be placed on the unvaccinated.”

While Douglas County has not yet approved a communitywide mask mandate, LMH leaders spent considerable time talking about the need to wear masks throughout the community, regardless of whether individuals are vaccinated.

“I know a lot of people think ‘I’ve been vaccinated and I’m OK,'” LMH Trustee Jim Brooke said. “They are in a crowd of vaccinated people and think this is all right, but that is probably where the Delta variant is spreading.”

Russ Johnson, president and CEO of LMH, said evidence suggests that children are more susceptible to the Delta variant.

“That is a whole other category of people we are unwittingly compromising when we don’t do our part,” Johnson said. “That is a group that can’t choose for themselves and can’t make the decision to go get vaccinated.”

Hoopingarner said the hospital has had pediatric COVID cases come in through the LMH emergency department, but hasn’t yet had to admit a pediatric COVID patient for an inpatient stay.

As of Wednesday, LMH had 15 inpatient COVID patients, and has had 61 COVID inpatients since June 15. Those numbers are lower than what many Kansas City area hospitals are seeing. Hoopingarner said LMH has started getting calls from several hospitals in the Kansas City area asking LMH to accept transfers from those hospitals to relieve patient crowding.

“In our previous surge we did not get phone calls from the Kansas City area, but this time we have,” she said.

Hoopingarner said LMH patients also have faced some delay times in being transferred to another hospital. She said most of the transfer cases LMH sends to other hospitals are not COVID-related cases. Rather they are patients who need non-COVID services that LMH doesn’t offer, but are having their medical care impacted by COVID caseloads in hospitals.

“We talk to the patients about the delays,” Hoopingarner said.

But Hoopingarner said the delays, the higher patient loads and increasing severity of cases were taking a toll on LMH staff throughout the hospital. She said overtime was up at the hospital, even as LMH has started to use “traveling nurses” to boost the level of nurses available to LMH.

“They are just extremely tired and the morale — it is very hard to be upbeat every day as this pandemic continues,” she said.

In other COVID updates from LMH:

• The hospital has reopened a COVID unit at the hospital for inpatients. In addition, two “surge units” in the intensive care unit have been reopened after having been closed earlier as COVID cases had subsided. Patient levels at LMH, however, haven’t yet risen to the point that those reopened surge units have housed patients.

• The hospital is testing every patient that is admitted for an inpatient stay at LMH. That is detecting positive cases of several patients who are asymptomatic.

• LMH reported that the overall vaccination rate for its employees is now 90% and growing daily, while the vaccination rate for physicians is 99%. LMH said that’s an all-inclusive number, meaning that some of the 10% who are unvaccinated are people who are medically unable to receive a vaccination.