COLUMBUS, Ohio - Ohio Deparment of Health Chief Medical Officer, Bruce Vanderhoff held a press conference on Thursday via Zoom discussing the state of Ohio hospitals.

Vanderhoff advised Ohioans to evaluate their symptoms before going to the hospital. Vanderhoff said that if someone is involved in a serious car accident or having a stroke, they should not hesitate to call 911 and seek emergency treatment.

However, Vanderhoff advised Ohioans with mild symptoms to talk to their health care provider or go to an urgent care clinic before going to the hospital. If a health care provider or urgent care facility advises an individual to go to the hospital, they should go, but be aware that they will likely experience a longer wait time than usual.

Vanderhoff went on to mention that Ohio's COVID-related hospitalizations have tripled since September of 2020, citing the delta variant "aggressively seeking out anyone without immunity" for this surge in hospitalizations.

Dr. Michael Canady also joined Vanderhoff for this conference. Canady expressed his concern for hospitals filling up to the point where people potentially won't be able to get the treatment they need for serious instances such as surgeries due to hospital overflow and understaffing.

Canady cited an incident in which a patient had an acute emergency urological problem which could have killed him in 24 hours. After he was seen in the operating room by a urologist, he had to be transferred to another hospital due to a lack of beds.

"We are quite frankly at a breaking point, and I don't know how much more we can handle without unfortunately patients not being able to get the care that they deserve in our health care system" Canady said.

 Dr. Brian Kaminski also made an appearance at the conference. Kaminski noted that one in eight patients he is seeing have COVID-19. Kaminski also noted that those who are sick enough to be admitted into the hospital are mostly unvaccinated, but there are some breakthrough cases among vaccinated individuals as well.

Kaminski also mentioned that eight hospitals in Lucas County were on EMS bypass on Monday noting that this was the first time he's ever experienced this. Kaminski explained what he did to combat this.

"Fortunately, we have a very good county health care delivery system and EMS system and we have a mechanism in place that allows us to more or less hit the reset button when that happens. So we all had discussions that evening and some of the discussions with our EMS medical director, and we activated a red alert process which in essence opens up all hospitals again," Kaminski said.

Vanderhoff said the best way to prevent the hospital overflow to continue is for Ohioans to do their part to reduce the spread of COVID including making the choice to get vaccinated.

"Vaccination is our best key to staying out of the hospitals and our best opportunity to allow our hospitals to continue their important work of saving lives," Vanderhoff said.