Inslee provides support to hospitals to fight Omicron variant

Reprinted from Governor Inslee's Medium page

With COVID-19 cases rising due to the transmissibility of the Omicron variant, hospitals are seeing a dramatic increase in COVID hospitalizations. The health care staffing shortages have led hospitals to be at or over their capacity to treat patients. Gov. Jay Inslee announced today that the state will be taking a number of actions to help alleviate the staffing crisis in hospitals.

The governor was joined for the virtual press conference by Umair Shah, MD, MPH, secretary, Washington State Department of Health and General Bret Daugherty, Washington State Military Department.

Deploy the National Guard

The governor has asked the Washington State National Guard to deploy 100 non-clinical personnel across the state to be deployed to the emergency departments to assist with various non-medical tasks to alleviate the crowded situation currently existing within those emergency departments.

The members of the state National Guard will be sent to:

• Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett
• Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital in Yakima
• Confluence Health/Central Washington Hospital in Wenatchee
• Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center & Children’s Hospital in Spokane; and
• provide COVID testing teams

With the significant demand for testing, the National Guard will be deployed to areas outside of hospitals to set up testing sites in the following locations:

• Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia
• Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland
• UW Medicine/Harborview Medical Center in Seattle
• MultiCare Tacoma General Hospital in Tacoma
• There are additional FEMA testing sites that will be set up in King County and Snohomish County