Fresno County’s COVID cases down, but omicron threat remains. Will the decline continue?
After two straight weeks of record high numbers of new coronavirus infections, Fresno County is seeing a significant decline in reported COVID-19 cases this week.
Through Friday, the Fresno County Department of Public Health reported 10,848 new laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases, driven by almost 7,000 over the previous weekend and nearly 1,600 that surfaced on Friday.
This week’s cases represents a big drop from more than 17,000 cases in each of the previous two weeks – the highest weekly totals since the first confirmed coronavirus infections were reported 23 months ago, in early March 2020.
The volume of cases, while down compared to the past few weeks, remains higher than any previous week of the pandemic from March 2020 until January of this year.
“We’re still really going through this omicron surge,” Fresno County interim health officer Dr. Rais Vohra said this week, referring to the highly contagious variant of coronavirus that emerged in November in countries in southern Africa and has since swept around the world.
“We’re hoping February is going to bring us some better numbers than January did,” Vohra added. “That’s certainly what the indicators around the state are pointing to, but we still need to wait to kind of see a peak and then hopefully a decline.”
Almost 59,800 new coronavirus cases were reported in January – a single month representing about 28% of all cases confirmed over the past 23 months. To date, 213,539 people in Fresno County have contracted the virus at some point in the pandemic.
Of those cases, the deaths of 2,477 patients have been attributed to COVID-19 on death certificates in Fresno County since March 2020.
“Unfortunately there’s a lot of lives that are being lost as a result of this omicron surge,” Vohra said Wednesday. “While in some respects it is milder than prior variants, it’s certainly not the same thing as ‘totally mild.’ And unfortunately we continue to see fatalities going up in all age groups.”
Burden on hospitals remains
Hospitals throughout Fresno County and the surrounding counties of the central San Joaquin Valley also continue to be pressured by a high volume of COVID-19 patients sick enough to require admission. On Thursday, the state Department of Public Health reported 611 confirmed coronavirus patients in hospitals in Fresno County, and 979 throughout Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties.
The seven-day average of 601.4 patients in Fresno County is the highest it’s been in more than a year. The Valleywide average of 953 COVID-19 patients in hospitals each day over the past seven days is also at its highest level since January 2021.
Vohra, who works emergency room shifts at Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno, said the hospital’s emergency department is stressed by a never-ending flow of patients.
“Everything is coming in: the COVID, the trauma, the car crashes, emergency surgeries, heart attacks, strokes,” he said. “Life doesn’t wait for a COVID infection, but unfortunately all of our hospital operations have to balance all of these different demands.”
Dan Lynch, emergency services director for Fresno County, said hospital emergency departments throughout the region remain under strain. Because of that, ambulance crews in the region continue to operate under an “assess-and-refer” policy in which patients who call for a ride to a hospital emergency room may be denied transport unless their case is a true emergency. Otherwise, those patients are referred to their family doctor, urgent care clinics, health clinics or telehealth services to relieve the flow into emergency rooms.
Between Jan. 12 and Feb. 2, Lynch said, a total of 553 patients were referred to other resources instead of being taken by ambulance to emergency rooms. He added that he expects the policy to continue until there is a significant decline in COVID-19 cases requiring inpatient treatment.
“Some parts of the state are making a downward trend in regard to the number of hospitalized (coronavirus) patients; they’ve kind of turned that corner,” he said Wednesday. “But that is not the case in the Central Valley, especially in Fresno.”
Lynch noted that throughout the pandemic, Fresno and the Valley have tended to lag a few weeks behind other parts of California, particularly Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, in COVID-19 trends of rising or falling cases, deaths or hospitalizations, “so we’re hopeful that we’re getting close to this peak and that we’ll start seeing some sort of a downward trend.”
