Minnesota was running out of hospital beds for Covid patients and health care workers to take care of them Wednesday as the state contended with the biggest surge in new cases and deaths this year.

With a vaccination rate of 59 percent, Minnesota is actually doing better than neighboring Wisconsin (57 percent), South Dakota (52 percent) and Iowa (55 percent), and much higher than North Dakota, where just 45 percent are fully vaccinated, according to figures compiled by the Mayo Clinic.

“These numbers in Minnesota concern me not just for the patients with Covid-19 but for all the patients with heart disease and cancer who are not able to get routine care as health care systems are at maximal capacity?

But now there are fewer health care workers to deal with the crisis than there were at the start of the pandemic, Malcolm said

“What’s important to understand is that this isn’t so much about the physical asset of a hospital bed or a ventilator, and those were big focuses earlier in the pandemic, but now this is really an issue of health care worker capacity,” Malcolm said