COVID-19 cases shoot up at Sacramento-area hospitals. Here’s what’s behind it, doctors say
The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has risen sharply in Sacramento-area hospitals since April, but local doctors say a number of those rushed to their emergency rooms arrived with injuries or ailments completely unrelated to the respiratory illness.
The COVID-19 diagnosis was simply coincidental, a finding that is revealed because all hospital patients are being screened for coronavirus to ensure that, if they have COVID-19, they can be isolated, said Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Health.
“For example, they have a broken leg and they need surgery, and we screen them and they’re positive,” Blumberg said. “They’re not being admitted for COVID or COVID-related complications. So there’s really just a handful of patients who are admitted specifically for COVID, for example, for pneumonia because they require oxygen therapy and they require antiviral treatment.”
Dr. Michael Vollmer of Kaiser Permanente estimated that somewhere between 30% and 50% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are likely in this category. The degree of community spread of this disease has soared since mid-April, he said, but many people have no symptoms or mild symptoms — and don’t know they have it.
Subvariants ‘even more transmissible in the face of immunity’
“The omicron variant has continued to mutate around the world,” said Vollmer, who heads up epidemiology for Kaiser’s Northern California region. “It’s passing from person to person in a setting where there’s immunity either through vaccination or prior infection. The virus is continuing to evolve with us as we evolve immunity to it, and what’s happened since the spring and now into summer is that underneath this sort of persistent community spread, the virus has changed. We now are seeing the subvariants of omicron that are even more transmissible in the face of immunity.”
At Dignity Health hospitals, the COVID-19 positivity rate jumped to 17.5% in June, up from 11% in May, said Dr. Parimal Bharucha, head of the department of pulmonary and critical care for Mercy Medical Group.
It used to be that people who recovered from COVID-19 would have eight to 12 weeks of natural immunity, the physicians said, but the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 can defeat those checkpoints after four to six weeks.
Concerns about newest BA.2.75 subvariant
These new strains are causing the majority of all cases in California, all three experts said, and there’s concern about a new omicron strain known as BA.2.75, first detected in India. So far, Vollmer said, all these variants appear more likely to cause milder symptoms in healthy people than either the omicron or delta variants, meaning there are fewer patients arriving at hospitals with dangerously low oxygenation levels.
Patients do appear to have a tougher time shaking these variants, Vollmer said, and are fighting longer-term battles with COVID-19 symptoms. The virus gets into many organs, including the brain, Vollmer said, and scientists are still studying its long-term impact.
The good news is that, if you are fully vaccinated and fully boosted under the guidelines offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, then you have the lowest risk of developing severe disease, the physicians said.
Blumberg urged everyone to pay attention to CDC recommendations for booster vaccinations because they are so crucial to surviving COVID-19. He recalled thinking he could wait a bit for his second booster, but then he was studying data from the CDC and read that people over age 50 who had received only three doses of vaccine were four times more likely to die if they hadn’t received the fourth shot. He went the same day and got it.
The unvaccinated in that age group are 42 times more likely to die than their fully vaccinated peers, Blumberg said, and unvaccinated people 5 and older have six times the risk of dying from COVID-19 than those who have been immunized.
Beyond the jab, these are tips to avoid COVID
As a pediatrician, Blumberg said, he has urged parents to get children ages 6 months and older vaccinated, saying data has shown that kids are much more likely to suffer life-threatening complications from COVID-19 than they are from the shots.
There’s no turning the clock back when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, Vollmer said so everyone has to decide how they will move forward with a disease that is still killing more than 300 Americans a day.
“I think it’s a mistake to move forward without learning from lessons of the past,” Vollmer said. “There needs to be real discussion -- and some of this is happening — about how we can move forward, do the things that we all need to do to feel like human beings, see family, be able to go to work, be able to do things with other people, and ... do that safely?”
He shared some commonsense strategies, in addition to vaccination, that will reduce the amount of virus exposure that people have: Meet in outside areas. Mask when indoors. Take advantage of at-home testing to ensure you can get timely access to monoclonal antibodies or antiviral medications, which are most effective early in the disease progression.
No one can predict how long COVID-19 will continue to kill people at current rates, Vollmer said, but over time, human beings will gain more and more immunity to SARS-COV-2 because they have encountered it so often. Vaccination helps in that process, he said.
“It’s not a forever kind of equation,” he said, “but we just can’t predict because of the randomness inherent in all those numbers ... which way the needle will go.”
COVID-19 continues to offer up surprises, Vollmer said: Unlike influenza, there’s no seasonality to this virus. Rather, surges occur as new strains adapt ways to elude prior natural immunity or vaccinations.
And, no one predicted that community spread would rise as sharply as it has this summer. Tuesday’s update from the California Department of Public Health reported 208 COVID-19 patients in Sacramento County hospitals. That number stood at 54 on April 15. Placer County’s most recent count was 84, up from 31 on April 15.
Despite these steep jumps, the pressure upon hospitals has greatly subsided, Blumberg and Bharucha said. It now is being distributed across the overall health care system, Blumberg said, in outpatient clinics, primary care doctors’ offices, test-to-treat facilities, pharmacies and other settings.
This story was originally published July 13, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "COVID-19 cases shoot up at Sacramento-area hospitals. Here’s what’s behind it, doctors say."
