As if fighting COVID-19 isn’t enough. Healthcare facilities hardly needed another deadly superbug during the thick of the pandemic battle as resources have been focused on the viral COVID with little left over to fight off a bacteriological invasion. But the struggles of the last nine months might have left hospitals vulnerable to outbreaks of multidrug-resistant organism infections. 

That’s the situation healthcare providers at an unnamed New Jersey hospital found themselves in, according to Infection Control Today. From March to June, hospital officials and managers had to suspend the usual infection prevention and control (IPC) protocols to fight COVID-19, according to Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (CRAB) has rarely been seen in the United States, but it has begun to emerge as a deadly pathogen where it does strike, with a 55 percent mortality rate and an ability to resist most antibiotics. Whenever and wherever it strikes in the United States, healthcare officials take no chances. CRAB invaded a skilled nursing facility in February 2018, and the Utah Department of Health and the CDC were all over it. 

The 500-bed acute care hospital in the study managed to get COVID under control in late May and reactivate its usual IPC practices. When that happened, CRAB cases returned to a pre-COVID-19 level, which is usually about two cases a month.

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