COVID hospital cases tick up after last week’s dip in Fresno County and the Valley
After sagging to fewer than 250 patients requiring hospital treatment for COVID-19 infections in Fresno County last week, medical centers in the county saw an increase of more than 23% within mere days, before settling down late this week at just below 300 patients.
Between laboratory-confirmed coronavirus cases and suspected patients with symptoms consistent with the respiratory disease, 299 people were being treated in Fresno County hospitals for COVID-19 on Thursday, according to the California Department of Public Health. That’s down from 303 just two days earlier. Fresno County had spent almost three weeks with fewer than 300 hospitalized patients prior to Tuesday.
Those in hospitals on Thursday in Fresno County included 58 confirmed COVID-19 patients who were sick enough to require treatment in intensive-care units.
“Our hospitals are on this wild roller coaster ride with hospitalized patients,” said Dan Lynch, emergency medical services director for Fresno County. In a Friday briefing with reporters, he described the increase of dozens of patients requiring hospital care for COVID-19 as “a significant hit for hospitals do deal with.”
The biggest challenge facing local medical facilities remains staffing, as doctors, nurses and other hospital workers miss work because they’re isolating after being exposed to COVID-19 or in quarantine after testing positive for the virus. Hospitals and their shorthanded staffs have labored for months with coronavirus cases and other medical needs filling up their acute-care beds, intensive-care units, and their emergency departments.
In recent weeks, as was the case during a major winter surge in late 2020 and earlier this year, additional help has arrived in the form of outside medical teams to provide a measure of relief.
Lynch said those teams from the California National Guard and the state Department of Public Health are committed to hospitals in the Fresno area through the end of October. After that, he added, the state will end its financial support for those workers and hospitals will need to pick up the tab to keep them going beyond Oct. 31.
“Hospitals are trying to strategize how to deal with it after the state steps away from assisting with the funding,” Lynch said.
New cases falling, deaths rising
A similar spurt of hospitalizations occurred across the neighboring counties in the central San Joaquin Valley over the past week, with patient numbers dipping to below 550 throughout Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties before climbing back to 614 confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases as of Thursday in the region. Of those, 107 were confirmed coronavirus patients requiring ICU treatment.
Fresno County saw 1,592 new lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases this week through Thursday; neither the county Department of Public Health nor state health officials issued a report of cases or additional fatalities for Fresno County on Friday.
This week’s tally of weekly new cases is the lowest since late July, as Fresno County and the surrounding Valley region were on the upswing in a surge fueled largely by the fast-spreading, highly contagious delta variant of coronavirus.
Across the Valley, almost 4,100 new cases were confirmed and reported this week by county health departments, the smallest weekly total since early August.
The number of lives lost to COVID-19 in the Fresno County and the Valley, however, continues to climb so far in October. Fresno County health officials reported 33 fatalities this week, pushing the total for this month so far to 127. The reports represent the confirmation of a death caused by the coronavirus, not the date of death.
Valleywide, 83 deaths were reported by county health officials this week through Friday. So far in October, 281 fatalities have been officially attributed to COVID-19 in the central San Joaquin Valley region.
Since the first confirmed local cases of the global pandemic surfaced in the Valley in March 2020, more than 134,000 people have contracted COVID-19 infections in Fresno County, and almost 297,000 Valleywide.
Fatalities from coronavirus in Fresno County now number 2,084; the death toll Valleywide is 4,274
