COEUR d’ALENE – Dr. Robert Scoggins has been involved with the COVID-19 response at Kootenai Health since day one.

These days, he doesn’t like what he’s seeing.

“I never thought we would get to this point to where we had this many COVID patients in an ICU setting,” he said during a press conference Wednesday. “When we talked about these plans over a year ago, I really doubted we'd ever get there. We're definitely there now and still trying to think of what do we do next.”

Kootenai Health had 115 COVID-19 inpatients on Wednesday including two pediatric patients, with 41 requiring critical care. Seventeen are on ventilators as the hospital continues to operate under crisis standards of care.

While he was hopeful patient volumes would decrease, Jeremy Evans, chief regional operations officer and COVID incident commander, said that isn’t happening.

“It continues to stress our resources, especially in our critical care unit with almost twice the normal capacity that we're seeing,” he said.

Scoggins said Kootenai Health is seeing its highest death numbers of the pandemic. In September, it had 34 COVID deaths in the hospital and 19 non-COVID deaths. In August there were 24 COVID deaths at Kootenai Health.

“It’s been disheartening to see these patients die,” he said. “Several of them are younger. There are patients that we get to know, they do spend many days in the ICU and we do everything we can to get them better and get them out but unfortunately, as we've learned with COVID, that sometimes we're unsuccessful.

The Panhandle Health District reported 191 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, and overall deaths in PHD now total 475. Of those, 13 were people under the age of 50, while 378 were over the age of 70, according to the PHD website.

Statewide, there have been 2,854 deaths attributed to the coronavirus, with 115, or 4% of total deaths, of those people under the age of 50. The majority of deaths in Idaho, 74%, have been people over the age of 70.

No one in Idaho under the age of 18 has died of the virus, according to the state website.

Scoggins said the biggest change they have seen lately is that younger people are dying than in December, January and in July, when it had its last spike in patients.

“I think that it just talks to how much different it is now, this delta variant, which is about 100% of the cases reported from the state,” he said.

He said the delta variant makes people sicker and it requires more resources to care for them.

“From an ICU standpoint. I think the volumes have been just incredible,” he said.

Scoggins said patients die for different reasons, such as heart attacks, traumas and cancer.

“We've never, ever seen this high of a death rate of patients, especially from one disease,” he said. "I think I've probably averaged around 20 deaths a month, somewhere in that range, and 34 deaths from one disease processes. Unbelievable.”

Scoggins called it “very, very disheartening, very surprising.”

He offered a somber analysis of the situation.

“I've signed a lot of death certificates in the last couple of months, and a lot of death certificates of young people that I don't think should have been hospitalized,” he said. “This, in my mind, is is a very preventable disease.”

He said the vaccines work well and expressed disappointment that so many have declined to get vaccinated.

In Idaho, 784,135 people age 12 and older are fully vaccinated, 52% of the eligible population. Nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 182.5 million people, 55% of the population, is fully vaccinated.

“I look at how many years of life somebody has ahead of them, and we're losing a lot of young people that have many years of life ahead of them, and probably could have been avoided if they had been vaccinated,” Scoggins said.