As COVID-19 spread rapidly throughout the month of November, hospitals across Iowa felt a surge of patients needing critical care — and that was no different at Pella Regional Health Center.

CEO Bob Kroese says the hospital did experience a recent uptick in the number of patients coming in with the virus — however, he feels they were also prepared for an eventual increase, and as of this week, they have been able to manage the influx, which has appeared to level off.

“Overall, we’ve experienced a spike over the last couple of weeks,” he says. “During the summer months, there had been pretty low numbers that we were seeing here, but in the last week or two, we have experienced a spike. We monitor that on a daily basis, and we feel that everything is under control quite well.”

Dr. Craig Wittenberg is Chief of Medical Staff Affairs at Pella Regional, and says despite the ability to handle the largest surge of COVID-19 to date, they still are working through issues caused by the increase in patients.

“We had a big surge last week — we were up to 21 patients in the hospital who had COVID last week, and our hospital med surg area has a total of 28 beds, so we had 75 percent of our beds full, and that didn’t take anyone into account anyone who was sick with a stroke or some other issue,” he says. “So we were very full–which has quieted down, but staffing is still a big issue, and trying to find nurses and beds is difficult sometimes.”