Hospital ICU capacity shrinks as coronavirus cases climb in Fresno and Valley counties
Hundreds of new coronavirus cases reported Wednesday morning by Fresno and Tulare counties have pushed the total number of infections in the central San Joaquin Valley to more than 85,000 since the first confirmed local cases in early March.
The California Department of Public Health reported that Fresno accumulated 333 more COVID-19 cases since its Tuesday update. That’s the fifth consecutive day with more than 300 new confirmed infections leading into the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Fresno County is now lurching beyond 37,000 residents who, at some point over the last eight months, have tested positive for the virus.
Tulare County’s Health & Human Services Agency reported 198 new cases on Wednesday, as well as three additional deaths. The total case count in Tulare County now stands at more than 20,000, including 308 deaths attributed to COVID-19.
The ongoing surge of new cases in Fresno County and the broader six-county region is also driving an increase in the number of patients who are sick enough to require hospitalization for treatment of the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus. At the same time that hospitals are already dealing with more patients for other illnesses and injuries.
The state health department reported that as of Tuesday, hospitals in Fresno County were treating 259 confirmed COVID-19 patients, as well as 29 other people with symptoms but for whom testing had not yet confirmed the disease.
Of those hospitalized, 42 patients were being treated in intensive-care units – 37 confirmed to have the illness, plus five suspected cases.
According to state hospital licensing data, Fresno County hospitals have a combined 149 licensed intensive-care unit beds. But as of Tuesday, between coronavirus patients and other seriously ill ICU patients, the state reported that local hospitals were down to only 14 intensive-care beds available for more patients.
Across Fresno, Kings, Madera, Merced and Tulare counties, just over 60 intensive-care beds remained available for additional patients, out of a licensed ICU capacity of 312.
The potential shortage of ICU beds for seriously ill patients, whether they have COVID-19 or not, is prompting worry among leaders in the Valley’s medical community. They noted that the curve of the current rise in coronavirus cases is steeper than it was in the summer, when hospitals found themselves pushed to the limits of their bed capacity and staffing.
Dr. Lori Weichenthal, assistant director of the UCSF Fresno emergency medicine program, said a growing number of medical staff – doctors, nurses and others – are being sidelined because they are in quarantine or isolation after being exposed to the virus or testing positive.
“We were fortunate in the first surge that many of our providers did not get COVID,” Weichenthal said this week. “But we’ve had four positives in the last four days among our providers. That really suggests that this is going to hit our nurses, hit our techs (and) hit our physicians in a much larger way than it did in the summertime.”
“It impacts our ability to provide quality care to our patients in the Valley,” Weichenthal added. “You can have all the ventilators you want, you can have new treatments, we can understand the disease process a lot better. But if we don’t have nurses and techs and physicians to provide care, it really doesn’t matter.”
Around the Valley
Wednesday’s COVID-19 case updates from counties in the central San Joaquin Valley include:
Fresno County: 333 new cases. 37,021 to date; no additional deaths, 477 to date. Fresno County only updates fatalities on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Kings County: No update as of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. On Tuesday, the county reported 10,359 cases to date, including 4,957 among inmates at state prisons in Avenal and Corcoran; 87 total deaths to date, including 10 among prison inmates.
Madera County: 109 new cases, pushing the county beyond 6,000 for a total of 6,047 to date; two additional deaths, 85 to date.
Mariposa County: Four new cases, 124 to date; no additional deaths, two to date.
Merced County: 77 new cases, 11,537 to date; no additional deaths, 179 to date.
Tulare County: 198 new cases, 20,550 to date; three additional deaths, 308 to date.
Valleywide, 85,638 people have had confirmed infections of coronavirus since March; of those, 1138 have died.
This story was originally published November 25, 2020 at 1:38 PM.
