WESTFIELD – Baystate Noble Hospital is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 patients as the delta variant wave continues to elevate the overall case count locally and nationwide.

Dr. Sundeep M. Shukla, chief of emergency medicine at Baystate Noble, said that the hospital in Westfield has been full most of the time in recent weeks due to the current COVID-19 surge. He said Baystate Noble has seen both unvaccinated and vaccinated people come to the Emergency Department with COVID-19 symptoms, but there’s a difference between the two populations.

“We’re seeing a mix of the two, but the people who are needing to be admitted, needing a higher level of care, or need life-saving intervention, are mostly unvaccinated,” said Shukla.

Though the hospital has been full, it hasn’t had to turn anyone away, Shukla said.

“Our goal is to treat everyone who comes in as a patient. Our community means a lot to us and that means we have to rise to the occasion,” said Shukla.

Baystate Noble is not at the point of triaging care, as has been reported at other hospitals in parts of the U.S. with more significant outbreaks of COVID-19. Shukla said the hospital has contingency plans in place for such an occurrence, but have not needed to use them.

Shukla also confirmed that there have been children admitted to the Baystate Noble Emergency Department with COVID-19, though he did not say how many or what percentage of overall patients they represented. He said that he has seen an overall age range from as young as 2 months old to more than 100 years old in the Emergency Department. Vaccines have not been approved for any children under the age of 12.

Shukla said that Baystate Noble has access to monoclonal antibodies, a treatment for severe COVID-19 patients which is reported to be effective at mitigating the worst symptoms of the virus.

“The preliminary report is that it is very effective at reducing symptoms in patients that are positive,” said Shukla.

The antibody treatment takes place in a separate suite from the Emergency Department, and is only given to patients who are considered eligible and have a severe active case of COVID-19.

Shukla said the main concern right now is the fact that the city of Westfield, and much of the area served by Baystate Noble, has a relatively low vaccination rate when compared to the rest of Massachusetts. In Westfield itself, 56 percent of residents have received at least their first dose, and 51 percent are considered fully vaccinated. These figures represent some improvement in recent weeks, but Westfield continues to lag the rest of the state in vaccination.

Shukla said that a task force has been established between Baystate Health and the Westfield Health Department to try to get the vaccine to at-risk groups within Westfield. He said it consists of a lot of community outreach and conversations with community leaders who they hope can influence some of the vaccine hesitant populations of Westfield to get the shot.

Though many residents of Westfield and Hampden County have yet to receive even one dose of the vaccine, booster shots will apparently be made available to the general public within days. On Sept. 20, booster shots will be available for people eight months after they received their second dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shots. Though both vaccines were initially highly effective at preventing COVID-19 infection, recent studies from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that the efficacy of the shots can decline significantly over time, especially with the Pfizer shot. The CDC study puts some blame on the delta variant, which may have mutated enough to evade the defenses built by vaccines designed to fight the initial COVID-19 outbreak. The vaccines are still considered to be highly effective at preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death.

They are also still considered to be more effective at preventing infection than if one had not been vaccinated at all, even if that effectiveness has waned somewhat.

Shukla said there is little data on how effective the booster shot strategy would be if significant portions of the population have not received even one dose of the shot, but he recommends that those who received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines eight months ago receive the booster shot as well. It is not known when those who received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be cleared to receive any sort of booster.

Shukla said that this battle against COVID-19 needs to be fought not just in hospitals, but in the wider community.

“We still have to be cognizant of protecting ourselves and our families. Our goal is to win this battle and we can only do so if we have excellent teamwork and look out for each other,” said Shukla. “People taking precautions like the vaccine, practicing good hygiene, wearing a mask, can probably save someone’s life you don’t even know. This is our community, we have to protect each other.”