County adds viral ‘surge’ unit
Separate COVID-CARE section at nursing home is backup for hospitals
Albany County officials announced Tuesday that St. Peter’s Health Partners is preparing to staff a 160-bed section of the county-run Shaker Place nursing home to handle an overflow of COVID -19 patients from local hospitals.
St. Peter’s CEO Dr. James Reed said Capital Region hospitals do not need the space now, but cases are growing quickly and they may need it soon. Reed said local hospitals are running at 70 to 80 percent capacity now — even with elective surgeries canceled and surge plans activated to increase space.
“Once we get to 85 percent we get nervous because that’s giving us only 15 percent of wiggle room if the surge really starts rolling,” he said.
Hospitals in the area have been adding more beds for COVID -19 patients, but staffing those extra beds is an issue, Reed said. St. Peter’s Health Partners, which has hospitals in Albany and Troy, has begun redeploying staff from physician offices to acute care settings to help, he said.
Still, more space may be
needed and the use of a non-hospital facility to handle the overflow is the first sign here that hospitalizations are climbing to a potentially calamitous level.
“Although we are not going to have to put patients in (Shaker Place) right away ... it’s very important that that arrow be added to our quiver so that as we face this very unpredictable surge time, we know ... we now have this backstop of Shaker Place where if we get pushed to that wall, we’re not sitting here worried we’re gonna be suddenly overcome,’” Reed said.
County Executive Dan Mccoy said the state Department of Health has approved the plan, and said space is available in the first place thanks to a recent renovation and expansion effort at Shaker Place that wrapped up last week. Residents and staff moved into the new part of the building, leaving a four-story tower in the old space vacant and unused, he said.
He emphasized that the overflow hospital space will be separate from nursing home operations in every possible way — addressing a concern from earlier in the pandemic when the state effectively instructed nursing homes to accept COVID -19 patients, a move some believe may have fueled fatalities among their highly vulnerable populations.
The tower that will house the overflow beds has its own entrance and ventilation system, Mccoy said, and St. Peter’s will use its own employees to staff the beds. COVID -19 patients would occupy the space, said Reed, but only those who are no longer considered infectious.
The eight-county region has been averaging 968 new cases a day, and hospitals are currently caring for 529 coronavirus patients, including 76 in ICUS. Remaining hospital capacity is down to 25 percent, and ICU capacity remains the lowest in the state at 19 percent. In the meantime, health officials believe the anticipated Christmas and New Year’s surge has not been fully felt.
“One of the alarming things that has bothered me is when you look out in California and when you see people in parking garages, you see ambulances circulating for a half hour to two hours trying to get someone in that hospital, you see what’s going on in El Paso, Texas,” Mccoy said. “You go around and you educate yourself. Hospitals are at their capacity and they ’re doing makeshift hospitals all over. I don’t want to have that happen here in the Capital Region.”
The development comes as the county reported two more county residents have died due to complications from virus: a woman in her 50s and a man in his 80s. The county also confirmed 351 new infections overnight — its highest one-day total since the pandemic began. Of those, 287 could not be traced back to a clear transmission source, McCoy said. There are now 155 Albany County residents hospitalized with the virus, a net increase of seven from Monday.
Saratoga County deaths
Saratoga County is reporting 17 deaths from COVID -19 among its residents since Friday — the most fatalities it has recorded in a three-day period since the pandemic began.
The fatalities were logged on the county ’s data dashboard late Monday night, raising the county ’s known death toll from the disease from 36 on Friday to 53 on Monday. County officials said in a statement the unusually large jump in deaths was the result of a “data reconciliation” effort that led to the discovery of previously unreported deaths from area nursing homes.
Albany County has encountered the same problem. Indeed, the only other time a local county reported a spike in deaths this large was May 30, 2020, when County Exec
utive Mccoy announced the county had learned of 24 previously unreported nursing home deaths.
Nursing homes are only required to report COVID -19 deaths to the state Health Department and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which have oversight authority of them. This has created reporting delays that have frustrated some local leaders trying to respond to the pandemic in real time.
Saratoga County officials did not disclose how long ago the nursing home
deaths actually occurred.
Meanwhile, deaths from COVID -19 are climbing at their fastest clip yet in the Capital Region.
It took just 15 days for the region to go from 500 to 600 deaths — a milestone the region crossed last week — compared to 26 days for the area to go from 400 to 500 deaths (the post-thanksgiving surge) and more than five months to go from 300 to 400 deaths (the summer lull).
Even in the early days of the pandemic, when nursing homes were hit
hard by the virus, it took approximately one month each to cross the 100 and 200 mark.
This is happening as a new, more contagious version of the virus — known as the B.1.1.7 variant — has been detected in Saratoga County. That variant was identified through a sequencing project the state’s Wadsworth Laboratory in Albany has been working on since the start of the pandemic, and epidemiologists believe community spread is probably already well under way.