As Oregon continues to set daily records for COVID-19-related hospitalizations since Aug. 10, a Grant County resident said it took over 24 hours to find an available hospital bed after her husband had a heart attack last month.

Kay Steele said her husband, Terry, went from near death to not getting access to more than 10 different hospitals. She said hospitals from Idaho, central and western Oregon and Washington state turned them down due to capacity issues in their intensive care units.

By the next day, Steele said Terry’s condition reached a point that emergency service providers refer to as “critically urgent.” She said this is where one’s life is threatened at that moment, and at that point, she said, critical access hospitals like Blue Mountain Hospital will send an air ambulance helicopter, even if they do not have a bed.

She said the whole point is to at least connect the patient to a critical care team. In Terry’s case, she said, it was a cardiac team.

Steele said Terry, a big man but by no means overweight who is in good shape for his age, had more than a 90% blockage of the main artery and nearly lost his life. Luckily, Steele said, the doctors were able to put in a stent at St. Charles hospital in Bend and clear the blockage.

Meanwhile, she said, some told her that the difficulties in locating an intensive care unit bed were “nothing new,” that they experience these problems every summer.

Grant County Health Administrator Kimberly Lindsay said last week the strain on hospitals is anything but ordinary. Nonetheless, she said she wanted to be “thoughtful” when it comes to “fear-mongering.”

For example, she pointed out that Grant County is in better shape in terms of COVID-19 infections than all but one other county in Oregon.

But, she said, from what she has seen with the virus over the last 18 months, Grant County may likely be getting a later start in terms of rising case rates, as it did in previous surges.

“We’re just getting a late start to the same race that has the same distance,” she said.

While she emphasized that was just a prediction and said she hoped she was wrong, the county’s health department has reported 41 new cases in the county since Aug. 16.

According to the New York Times COVID-19 Data Tracker, the county is at an average of two new cases per day — a 250% increase from the average two weeks ago.

According to the tracker, since the beginning of the pandemic, at least 1 in 12 residents have been infected, a total of 594 reported cases.

The Oregon Health Authority reported 87 COVID-19 hospitalizations Sunday in Grant County’s region seven, which it shares with Deschutes, Harney, Klamath, Jefferson, Klamath, Lake and Wheeler counties.

OHA reports that there are three available intensive care unit beds in the region.

Lindsay said what would typically take half an hour to get a helicopter on the ground or a fixed-wing airplane to fly somebody out is now taking up to 15 hours — before transport is even happening.

Some, she said, are not making it and die while en route.

“I would really like to stress that even if Grant County maybe isn’t seeing the same levels of sickness now, Grant County is still impacted because St. Charles and Boise are full,” she said.