Fresno County averaging 400 to 600 new COVID cases daily. Valley ICUs remain burdened
The number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Fresno County and neighboring Valley counties has fallen slightly since last week, offering a meager measure of relief to nurses, doctors and others who have been coping with a surge of cases over the past couple of months.
Coronavirus inpatient numbers at hospitals across the central San Joaquin Valley peaked at 776 on Thursday, including more than 420 in Fresno County, according to data from the California Department of Public Health. Of those patients, more than 140 Valleywide and 89 in Fresno County were sick enough to require treatment in intensive-care units.
By Monday, the figures had dipped to 741 patients overall and 130 intenstive-care patients Valleywide, and 390 patients including 82 ICU patients in Fresno County.
Still, hospitals are treating far more coronavirus patients – while at the same time caring for patients with a wide range of other illnesses, conditions and maladies – than they were just a few months ago. In early July, fewer than 50 COVID-19 patients were in hospitals in Fresno County, and fewer than 70 patients across Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties.
The inflated hospitalization figures are being fueled largely by a major and ongoing surge in the number of new coronavirus cases being reported each day – an average of between 400 and 600 new cases per day in Fresno County over the past two weeks, with the Valleywide average of about 1,100 new cases each day over the same period.
“With our numbers of new cases being as high as they are, we know that unfortunately some of those people are going to require hospitalization as well,” said Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, in a Sept. 10 media briefing. The sickest patients, if they survive the disease, often spend days or even weeks in intensive care units before they can be discharged, he added.
That’s putting a burden on intensive-care units at hospitals across the region.
“All of our Fresno County hospitals are reporting ICU levels between 125 and 150% (of capacity) with ICU patients being housed in other areas of the hospital,” Fresno County emergency medical services coordinator Dan Lynch said Tuesday.
The county’s largest hospitals are holding some ICU patients in their emergency rooms until they can be admitted, Lynch said, as well as between 30 to 60 less critical patients patients waiting to be admitted. “About one-third of these patients are COVID positive,” he added.
To help nurses and doctors who are exhausted after 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and who are shorthanded as hundreds of hospital staff are in quarantine or isolation after having been exposed to the virus or have tested positive, medical facilities have hired travel nurses to augment their staff.
Fresno’s largest hospital organization, Community Medical Centers, last week welcomed more than 100 travel nurses to Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno and Clovis Community Medical Center.
Additionally, Lynch said, the state of California has stepped up its assistance to Valley hospitals – including the deployment of California National Guard teams of nurses and emergency medical technicians to Community Regional and Clovis Community medical centers, Kaweah Health Medical Center in Visalia and Sierra View Medical Center in Porterville.
“These Cal Guard teams … are being used to bolster staffing in emergency departments,” Lynch said. Hospitals that have been short of staffing for their intensive-care units during the current COVID-19 surge have been holding some critically ill patients in their emergency departments until beds became open to admit them into the hospital.
Even more help may be on the way. Last summer, and again in the winter, the U.S. Department of Defense deployed several medical teams to hospitals in Fresno and Tulare counties to assist with previous surges of hospitalizations. Lynch said federal assistance is being considered once again for hospitals in Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties.
As other parts of California see a slowdown in hospitalizations, additional planning at the state level could move more medical staff into the Valley, but no decisions have been finalized as of Tuesday, Lynch said.
This story was originally published September 14, 2021 at 5:51 PM.
