With hospitals full, Central California pleading to send COVID-19 patients to L.A.

The COVID-19 surge still affecting Central California is so dire that health officials are pleading with state officials to make it easier to transfer hospital patients to areas like Los Angeles County.

“We don’t have enough hospitals to serve the population and the needs,” said Dr. Rais Vohra, the Fresno County interim health officer. Hospitals across the entire San Joaquin Valley are “often running over capacity, so that they’re holding dozens and dozens of patients in the emergency department.”

Officials in the San Joaquin Valley are expecting a difficult winter. Vaccination rates are still relatively low, and in Fresno County, the region’s most populous county, the COVID-19 hospitalization rate is quadruple what is being seen in L.A. and Orange counties, and more than quintuple that of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Hospitals are consistently operating above capacity, and emergency rooms are still so packed that ambulances are stuck waiting outside hospitals to drop off patients, said Dale Dotson, operations coordinator for the Central California Emergency Medical Services Agency.

Some hospitals are so crowded that ambulance patients suffering from strokes or cardiac-type symptoms are diverted to different facilities than typical to ensure that there’s enough staff available to take care of them when they arrive. Hospitals and ambulance providers continue to report struggling with staffing, Dotson said.

Officials from the San Joaquin Valley are pleading with California state officials to find a way to make it easier to transfer hospital patients to other, less impacted areas.

“It’s really hard to transfer across counties in the state of California,” Vohra said. “When you look at Los Angeles ... they have hundreds and hundreds of open beds in Los Angeles County.”

“If we need to transfer patients out to keep our hospitals operational, we should really be able to do that with one or two phone calls. That’s not the situation right now. And so that’s a point of frustration that we’re hearing from multiple different facilities,” Vohra said. “We’re trying to really decompress as much as possible in anticipation of those winter numbers.”

It was not immediately clear why Fresno County hospitals are reporting difficulty in transferring patients to other parts of the state.

“The red tape ... it’s quite opaque,” Vohra said. “Obviously, every hospital has a transfer center, and they’re very used to doing transfers. But then that actually requires other hospitals to accept.”

The L.A. County Department of Health Services said in a statement that it “welcomes patients from other counties while ensuring healthcare services are readily available for residents in our county.”

The San Joaquin Valley has the worst COVID-19 hospitalization rate in all of California, with nearly 800 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in a region of more than 4 million people. By contrast, all of L.A. County has 558 COVID-19 patients, despite having a population of more than 10 million people.

For every 100,000 residents, Fresno County has 22 COVID-19 patients in its hospitals; while L.A. and Orange counties have six, and the San Francisco Bay Area, four. Some experts say it’s a sign of concern when the COVID-19 hospitalization rate is five or worse.

Just 55% of Fresno County’s residents are fully vaccinated. Statewide, the rate is about 63%; it’s 65% in L.A. and Ventura counties, 66% in Orange County, 69% in San Diego County and 78% in San Francisco.

A big test of the late fall and early winter will be the weeks following Thanksgiving, when officials will be looking at COVID-19 numbers closely to see if a surge emerges from gatherings from the holiday weekend.