South Carolina hospital systems are buckling under stress as COVID cases — including those in younger people from the delta variant — plague hospitals more while staff vacancies are hindering the ability to provide care.

Top healthcare system physicians from Prisma Health, Bon Secours St. Francis, Spartanburg Regional, AnMed Health and Self Regional Healthcare gathered virtually to warn the public about facilities that have reached full capacity while struggling to retain frontline healthcare workers.

“We’re seeing an unprecedented shortage of nursing personnel,” said Dr. Wendell James, the chief clinical officer for Prisma Health Upstate, speaking on behalf of the entire Prisma system. “The need for resources is continuing to climb faster than our ability to provide it. It’s extremely hard to meet the demand being placed on all of our systems.”

Prisma Health’s careers webpage listed 844 nursing positions open as of Thursday. James declined to say how many staffing vacancies Prisma currently had during Thursday’s press conference but said South Carolina is 3,000 to 3,500 nurses “short of what we need statewide to staff our facilities.”

Physicians continued to urge more people to get vaccinated as the surest effort to reduce COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.

“Please get vaccinated,” James said. “It’s the golden bullet we all have to avoid this turning into a bigger problem than it already has.”

Healthcare leaders also said they are seeing younger patients admitted to the hospitals because of the delta variant.

“This particular variant is having much more significant on younger people than the previous, original variant did,” James said.

Dr. Brad Mock, chief medical officer at AnMed Health, said hospital systems are seeing much fewer elderly patients than South Carolina did in the first surge, and he attributed the shift to early vaccinations mostly being among the elderly.

The healthcare leaders added that the rising COVID-19 hospitalizations were beginning to interfere with other types of care.

“It’s also getting difficult to do other types of medicine,” said Dr. Surabhi Gaur, Bon Secours St. Francis Health System Greenville’s chief medical officer. “So as we all continue down this road of a crisis, we don’t want to have to turn away people who are sick from other illnesses as well.”

Ten pediatric patients were hospitalized with COVID-19 at Prisma with one being in critical condition, James said. Earlier this month, Prisma physicians warned that pediatric units were seeing increases in other respiratory illnesses, like respiratory syncytial virus, as well as COVID-19.

Self Regional Healthcare often refers pediatric patients to the Greenville Children’s Hospital, but there were no beds available a few days ago, said Dr. Matt Logan, Self Regional Healthcare’s chief medical officer.

“We are managing them here, and we have great group of pediatricians and nurses here to help take care of them,” Logan said, “but it is a concern that if the numbers continue to increase and we’re starting to have to take care of sicker and sicker little ones, that it could be a problem developing.”

At Prisma Health system-wide, 94% of those admitted after testing positive for COVID-19 were unvaccinated as of Thursday, James said. There were 436 COVID-19 patients Thursday compared to 12 just seven weeks ago at the start of July.

The Greenville News is still seeking answers to additional questions regarding staff vacancies, trends in other pediatric cases and current impact on elective surgeries and emergency department wait times.

After months of declining cases, hospitalizations and deaths, COVID-19 cases have skyrocketed in South Carolina in the last two months .

Prisma Health, which covers much of the Upstate and Midlands, had only 12 COVID-19 inpatients on July 2 — that grew to 436 on Thursday.

In that same timespan, confirmed cases are more than 17 times higher in the state with 178 confirmed cases on July 2 and 3,259 confirmed cases on Thursday.

The current seven-day average of new daily cases is 4,362, according to Department of Health and Environmental Control data. Daily cases are inching closer to record peaks set last winter. The most confirmed cases reported in one day in South Carolina was 6,170 on January 8.

Deaths have also increased with many weeks in the summer reporting less than 30 deaths. Last week, there were 179 COVID-19 linked deaths reported across the state, according to DHEC data.

“The amount of COVID patients we are having in our hospitals is really impeding our ability to care for non-COVID patients,” Logan said.

Each of the health systems are managing bed capacity, staff and resources to attend to this surge, and asked the public to get their vaccinations and to mask up in public to help slow down the spread of the virus.

“Our staff is exhausted, has been pushed to the limit, and a little passed it, and we still are on the upswing on this surge,” Mock said. “So we absolutely would appreciate if people would do anything they can to help us with our staff.”

Daniel J. Gross is an investigative watchdog reporter focusing on public safety and law enforcement for The Greenville News. Reach him at dgross@greenvillenews.com or on Twitter @danieljgross. Subscribe to The Greenville News at greenvillenews.com/subscribe.