Colorado’s COVID-19 hospitalizations have ticked up and down over the past week, but, with only 502 hospital beds left statewide Tuesday afternoon, facilities warn they’re still facing an overall capacity crisis.

The good news is that COVID-19 hospitalizations have declined overall since late November; they now stand at 1,419, down from 1,565 on Nov. 22. The bad news is that downward trend reversed this weekend, and the overall, multifaceted pressure on hospitals has not abated. It’s still too early, state officials said Tuesday, to know what the COVID-19 metrics will look like moving forward, especially in the wake of Thanksgiving.

As of Tuesday afternoon, there were 79 intensive care beds left in Colorado, about 5% of total capacity. There were 423 acute care beds available, 6% of total capacity. Those numbers often fluctuate on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But over the past month, the state has consistently had fewer than 100 ICU beds.

“We’re still not out of the woods,” said Connie Price, the chief medical officer at Denver Health. She said the facility is delaying some procedures that would take up bed space. “We’re still feeling strained. We still have a lot of people needing our services. ... Overall, with capacity, we remain in a similar

status (as in November).”

Much attention has been paid to COVID-19 hospitalizations, largely because many of them are preventable through vaccinations and boosters. But the virus alone does not threaten to overload hospitals. Gov. Jared Polis said Thursday that pandemic patients make up between 15% and 25% of hospitals’ censuses. But that share “chews up a lot of resources,” he said, for hospitals that typically operate at 75% or more capacity.

The more dominant crises facing hospitals are driven by staffing shortages, primarily because of burnout, and an unprecedented spike in sicker patients who delayed care through the first several months of the pandemic. Conditions that may have been caught earlier or treated steadily have now spiraled, requiring longer hospital stays, higher levels of care and further stretching of resources and staff. It’s those factors, with more than 1,400 COVID-19 hospitalizations layered on top, that threaten hospitals’ capacity.

But those issues — staffing and delayed care effects — cannot be easily or quickly curbed. COVID-19 hospitalizations, meanwhile, are largely preventable, primarily through vaccinations and boosters.

Richard Zane, the chief innovation officer and an emergency medicine physician at UCHealth, said the unvaccinated “are the cause of this, full stop.”

“It can get a lot worse,” he said of the capacity crisis. “We have crisis standards of care for staffing, but we have not yet instituted crisis standards of care for care delivery. We’re pretty close.

“And that means that health care is going to be in the decision of things, like that you get a ventilator, and you don’t. You get into the hospital, and you don’t.”

Vaccinations and boosters remain the most effective way at preventing infection, hospitalization and death. But Polis and state health leaders have increasingly pushed monoclonal antibodies as a way to curb patient admissions. The treatments, delivered via IV or injection, have been demonstrated to be at least 70% effective at preventing hospitalizations.

But they need to be delivered early in infections — within 10 days — and before a patient is hospitalized. They’re also available only for high-risk patients, those 65 and older or with comorbidities that make them especially susceptible to severe illness. The doses are not going to prevent infection; they are not a vaccine, officials said, and are useful only after you’re sick and before you’re hospitalized.

Polis has cleared the way for the treatment to be more readily available. Patients can self-refer to receive them, rather than awaiting a doctor’s approval. But staffing has remained a challenge, hospital officials said, as it is across health care.

Resources are coming to help assuage the shortage: A five-person team of Department of Defense providers will arrive at Denver Health on Thursday, Price said, to set up another monoclonal antibody site.

A team has already been deployed within UCHealth to help support staffing overall and antibody administration specifically.

“It’s been huge,” Price said of the treatment’s impact on hospitalizations. “We have not been able to meet the demand at Denver Health, although as more and more systems have stood up this capability and as the state has begun to stand up their infusions, we have seen a little bit of a reprieve at our clinics.”

“It looks to me, when I look at my colleagues’ data, that Denver Health has a lower percentage of our capacity that is due to COVID than other systems,” she continued, “and I do believe it’s because we’ve put so much attention on the use of monoclonal antibodies, which have been shown to prevent the need for hospitalization.”

Zane said UCHealth has given out roughly 6,000 monoclonal doses since the beginning of the pandemic, but roughly 2,500 of those were in November alone. The system is distributing them now in its urgent cares and emergency departments, when high-risk patients present with symptoms and in some cases before they’ve tested positive.

Zane estimated that hundreds of hospitalizations and scores of deaths have been prevented at UCHealth alone since the pandemic began thanks to the treatment.

He said the system “quintupled down” on its antibody use by pushing it through various departments and facilities. A lot of patients are “enthusiastically” receiving the doses, he said, and the number of patients who say no “is not enough to even mention.”

But there’s a certain irony with those who are most interested in the treatment, he continued.

“The irony,” he said, “which is almost heartbreaking, is that the same patients who said no to vaccination for whatever reason, mostly around the misinformation around vaccines, are embracing, enthusiastically, monoclonal antibodies.

“It’s the same science, the same pace — even the same cells that were used to develop this.”