There are hopeful signs coronavirus’ grip on Fresno is easing. What doctors are saying
Hospitals in Fresno County and neighboring counties in the central San Joaquin Valley are dealing with their smallest numbers of coronavirus patients in over two months.
The grip that COVID-19 has held on hospitals and intensive-care units in December and January appears to be easing up, and health officials in Fresno County acknowledged this week they’ve dropped an emergency policy that called for ambulance crews to deny rides for patients to hospital emergency rooms unless they were in true need of emergency care.
The “assess and refer” policy, implemented in mid-December, was intended to ease the burden on hospital emergency departments that were finding themselves overwhelmed by a rising number of patients, both those with COVID-19 and those with other conditions or illnesses.
That, in turn, was forcing ambulance crews to wait at emergency rooms with their patients until space inside the hospital became available, before that ambulance could return to service and respond to new calls.
Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, said this week that as the numbers of new coronavirus infections in the community trend lower, so too has the disease’s burden on hospitals.
Hospitals and their ICUs are still plenty busy with other patients, he added, but the situation has stabilized to a point where officials believed it was appropriate to cancel the requirement that paramedics deny ambulance transport for patients who were assessed as non-emergency cases.
On Wednesday, hospitals across the county were treating 344 patients with confirmed COVID-19 infections, plus 13 more people with suspected coronavirus infections that had not yet been confirmed by testing. That’s the fewest confirmed COVID-19 patients in the county since Dec. 3, and down from a peak of almost 670 patients on Jan. 5.
Still, the number of patients requiring hospital treatment remains more than three times higher than at the beginning of November, before the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s holiday season.
Vohra noted that hospitals remain full or nearly full, and intensive-care units continue to handle dozens of critically ill COVID-19 cases as well as patients with other urgent needs including heart attacks, strokes, trauma and more. Fresno County typically has 149 licensed ICU beds; on Wednesday, coronavirus patients numbered 87, and hospitals had a countywide inventory of 15 open ICU beds available for new critically ill patients.
The overall burden on hospitals underscores the need for residents to continue taking steps to reduce opportunities for the virus to spread, such as wearing a mask in public, practice physical distancing indoors, and avoiding large gatherings of people.
The declining trend in hospitalizations comes as the overall number of new COVID-19 cases being identified through testing also diminishes from much higher volumes in December and January.
On Thursday, the state Department of Public Health reported 146 new confirmed coronavirus infections in Fresno County, less than half of Wednesday’s daily increase. The county has seen an average of about 304 cases each day over the past seven days – the lowest seven-day average since early December.
Through 11 months of the pandemic – since the first confirmed coronavirus case in Fresno County was reported in early March 2020 – almost 92,000 people have been infected with the virus at some point, whether they developed symptoms or not. Of those, 1,291 have died, including eight new fatalities that were reported Thursday by the Fresno County Department of Public Health.
Around the Valley
Coronavirus updates from other counties in the central San Joaquin Valley include:
Kings County: 83 new cases, 21,441 to date; five additional deaths, 205 to date. The county’s totals include almost 7,200 cases and 17 deaths among inmates at state prisons in Avenal and Corcoran.
Madera County: 49 new cases, 14,923 to date; no additional deaths, 189 to date.
Mariposa County: Four new cases, 385 to date; no additional deaths, five to date.
Merced County: 139 new cases, 27,701 to date; two additional deaths, 375 to date.
Tulare County: 131 new cases, 46,608 to date; 12 additional deaths, 684 to date. Tulare County has confirmed an average of almost nine deaths deaths each day since the start of February, compared to about six per day during the month of January.
Valleywide, hospitals had 603 patients with confirmed COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, including 145 in intensive-care units. The total coronavirus patient volume was the lowest since Dec. 5, and down from a peak of almost 1,100 on Jan. 5.
