‘Dire’ situation: Fresno County ICU capacity now at 0%, with COVID-19 cases growing
An ongoing torrent of new coronavirus cases has effectively reduced the intensive-care capacity of hospitals across Fresno County to zero.
Plus, the effects of Thanksgiving gatherings among families and neighbors have yet to be felt.
While hospitals in Fresno County had about nine ICU beds available for new seriously ill patients – either with or without COVID-19 – as of Monday, the state Department of Public Health’s latest assessment Tuesday set the remaining capacity at 0%.
“Our real concern is that we’re not seeing the peak effects of Thanksgiving gatherings,” Fresno County interim health officer Dr. Rais Vohra told reporters Tuesday. “It’s not just the hospital cases that we’re seeing today, it’s the number of positive cases that we know will go on to get hospitalized throughout the month of December.”
A total of 455 patients were hospitalized for treatment of confirmed or suspected coronavirus infections across the county Monday, including 85 seriously ill people requiring treatment in intensive-care units.
Between confirmed and suspected COVID-19 patients, and patients in ICUs for other serious illnesses or conditions, hospitals are definitely feeling the strain, Vohra said.
“I know that those who aren’t in the medical field may not understand, … ” he said. “But all the things you’re hearing about how impacted our hospitals are, about how dire this situation with our ICUs is, it’s absolutely true.”
That, he added, is why medical officials locally and statewide are imploring people and businesses to comply with a regional stay-at-home order that took effect Sunday night across the 12-county San Joaquin Valley region from San Joaquin County in the north to Kern County in the south.
Social and family gatherings, Vohra said, “certainly are playing a big role” in the number of new coronavirus infections being reported on a daily basis – an average of more than 340 cases each day over the last seven days. That’s almost 2,400 cases since last Wednesday.
Vohra added that between 10% and 15% of all people who are infected will need to visit a hospital emergency room for symptoms of the respiratory disease at some point in the days after their exposure.
Some of those will ultimately require hospitalization. “That is just an extraordinarily high number when you think about the number of new cases that we’re reporting day after day here in Fresno County and across the state,” he said.
When Fresno County saw hospitalizations of confirmed COVID-19 cases rise to more than 300 earlier this summer, “we thought that was a huge peak at that time,” Vorha said. The current figure is more than one-third greater than in the summer.
“If people are planning to get together with people outside their household, they really need to understand that is so risky, especially when we have a surge and when our case rate is as high as it is and testing positivity is as high as it is,” Vohra said.
“People think that we are being capricious or arbitrary in these recommendations, but what we’re trying to do is give people as many chances as possible not to catch or spread this virus.”
On Tuesday, the California Department of Public Health reported that Fresno County had an average of almost 24 new daily cases per 100,000 residents each day during the week ending Nov. 28. During that same seven-day period, more than 11% of people who were tested for coronavirus had results come back positive for the infection.
This story was originally published December 8, 2020 at 5:42 PM.
