Fresno sees another massive spike in COVID-19 cases, as nurses deal with hospital surge
For the second day in a row, the state health department on Thursday reported a sky-high number of new in Fresno County coronavirus cases revealed by recent testing.
California’s Department of Health Services showed more than 1,800 new confirmed infections in Fresno County. That followed Wednesday’s record number of almost 2,600 new cases. Prior to this week, the largest number of new cases reported on a single day in Fresno County was on Aug. 15, when there were 743 new infections.
The continued upswing in the number of new cases is also propelling hospitalizations higher. More people were being treated in hospitals, both in Fresno County and across neighboring Valley counties, than at any point in the coronavirus pandemic to date.
That’s putting a strain on hospital staffing and the ability of intensive-care units to care for the sickest patients – whether they have COVID-19 or other serious illnesses or conditions.
What’s driving the huge numbers of new daily cases? State officials say that because of the volume of the latest statewide surge in COVID-19 infections, an automated process is now in place to help counties deal with the reporting of positive test results coming in from testing laboratories.
“Typically, local public health departments receive cases into an inbox and manually process those cases,” according to a statement issued by the state health department. “However, with high transmission rates, this has become increasingly difficult. The auto processing feature ensures that local public health officials can quickly determine when cases occurred, which gives us all a better sense of COVID-19’s trajectory.”
One indicator of the scale of the apparent backlog in results is that almost 30% of the total statewide cases reported on Wednesday were from previous days, although the state did not indicate how far back those cases go.
In Fresno County, the 2,590 cases reported on Wednesday and an additional 1,857 on Thursday bring the total number of residents who have tested positive for the virus over the past 10 months to more than 49,000. Almost 22% of those have surfaced just since Dec. 1.
COVID-19 has been blamed on death certificates for 557 fatalities in Fresno County since the first confirmed cases in March.
Around the Valley
Coronavirus case updates Thursday from counties in the central San Joaquin Valley included:
Fresno County: 1,857 new cases, 49,173 to date; no additional deaths, 557 to date. Fresno County only updates fatalities on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Kings County: 315 new cases, 14,073 to date; no additional deaths, 101 to date. The totals include 6,354 cases and 14 deaths among inmates at state prisons in Avenal and Corcoran.
Madera County: 172 new cases, 8,441 to date; no additional deaths, 111 to date.
Mariposa County: Two new cases, 185 to date; no additional deaths, four to date.
Merced County: No update was available from the county by 4:30 p.m. Thursday. On Wednesday evening, county health officials issued their first update in five days, reporting an increase of 1,118 cases since Friday, 15,601 to date. The county also reported five additional deaths since Friday, 212 to date.
Tulare County: 400 new cases, 27,790 to date; seven additional deaths, 346 to date.
Across the Valley, more than 115,600 people have tested positive for infection by COVID-19 since March, whether they ever showed symptoms or not. Of those, 1,331 have died.
The hospital situation
Fresno County hospitals are dealing with more coronavirus patients than at any time since the global pandemic reached the Valley in early March. On Wednesday, 527 people were being treated in hospitals for confirmed cases of the respiratory illness, including 91 seriously ill patients in intensive-care units across the county.
Another 30 patients who are suspected of being infected with the virus, but for whom testing had not yet confirmed the result, were also in Fresno County hospitals on Wednesday, including five in ICUs.
Earlier this week, as ICU beds were in critically short supply across much of California, the state announced that it was relaxing nurse-to-patient ratios in intensive-care units – from two patients per nurse to three – to provide greater staffing flexibility to hospitals.
Fresno County’s interim health officer Dr. Rais Vohra, who works shifts in the emergency department at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, said the nurse-to-patient ratio is but one part of coping with the surge in intensive-care patients..
While providing the ability for each nurse to care for more patients, Vohra said it also increases the burden and stress on those nurses under already trying circumstances.
“We have to be sensitive to how hard everyone is working, the nurses being paramount in that assessment,” Vohra said this week.
“I don’t think this ratio being changed is permanent; it’s really just during this time of surge to allow hospitals to just serve the number of people that are coming in and dealing with the staffing shortages that they’re currently experiencing.”
At some of the largest hospitals in the Fresno-Clovis area – Community Regional Medical Center, Clovis Community Medical Center and Saint Agnes Medical Center – nearly 600 workers were off work because they were in isolation or quarantine from exposure or possible exposure to COVID-19, including 366 who are confirmed to have been infected with the virus.
Across the central San Joaquin Valley, hospitals were treating a total of 874 confirmed coronavirus patients, including 132 in ICUs. Another 61 patients suspected of being infected with the virus were also in hospitals, including seven in intensive-care units.
Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties have a combined total of 312 licensed adult ICU beds, of which 149 are at hospitals in Fresno County. The state reported that hospitals in Fresno County had 10 ICU beds available on Wednesday to handle new critically ill patients, while the other five counties collectively had 28 available ICU beds.
This story was originally published December 17, 2020 at 2:51 PM.
