NorCal’s ICUs around 75% full
Just shy of 25% of Northern California’s intensive care units are still available.
As of Saturday afternoon, 24.1% of the ICU beds in Northern California — Del Norte, Glenn, Humboldt, Lake, Lassen, Mendocino, Modoc, Shasta, Siskiyou, Tehama and Trinity counties — were still available, up from a day earlier when it was 20.9%, according to data from the state Department of Public Health. A stay-at-home order will go into effect, which would shut down certain industries like hair salons and restrict operations at others like restaurants, at 11:59 p.m. the day after ICU capacity drops to 15% or below within a region. It will remain in effect for at least three weeks.
“We are using a regional approach, in part, because that is how hospitals and health care delivery systems work,” California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said in a Thursday press conference. “When capacity can’t be met within a specific county, we lean on neighboring counties and their hospital delivery systems to care for a number of individuals.”
About 12% of COVID-19 cases will end up in the hospital two weeks after they’re confi rmed, Ghaly said, and within a week or week and a half, 10 to 30% of
those cases will end up in the ICU.
“We know that by seeing that transmission rate come down three weeks after putting the order in place that we should see projections of our ICU capacity improve, increase above 15%, which allows us to lift that regional stay-at-home order effectively,” he said.
Even though more ICU beds are available in the region, Deputy County Health Officer Dr. Josh Ennis said in a Friday media availability video that the county already has a limited ICU capacity because the county has a small population, so it “can be dramatically impacted by a swing of a few patients.”
“This is a very dynamic number,” Ennis said. “… Given how small they are, too, when there something such as a skilled nursing facility outbreak, where we know there’s a lot of people at risk for serious disease, that creates potential for a big influx in the hospital in a very short period of time, so it is very difficult to predict at what point we’ll be at capacity.”
Dr. Ian Hoffman, who is set to be appointed county health officer Tuesday, said the region is projected to hit its ICU capacity within the week and Humboldt County in particular has been seeing record growth. The county surpassing a thousand confirmed cases, hitting 1,014, since the pandemic began on Friday, and Hoffman said that growth is not expected to slow down soon.
“This really stems back to Halloween and the late part of October, early part of November,” Hoffman said. “We’ve yet to see the outcome of Thanksgiving. While the numbers we’ve seen at Granada (Rehabilitation & Wellness Center) are large, they’re certainly not nearly as large as the
other numbers we’ve been seeing daily coming out for the last several weeks.”
The county Public Health Department was concerned about the growth in daily confirmed COVID-19 cases, which Hoffman said went from single digits in October “to 10 plus a day by the beginning of November.”
“By the time we were heading into Thanksgiving we were seeing 20,” Hoffman said, “and now we’re seeing 40.”
Ennis said there’s a growing body of research that preventative measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as wearing a mask and washing your hands, work. He added it was important to implement them in order to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.
“That 90- car locomotive has gained significant speed,” Ennis said, “and we need to act now to slow it before we’re out of options.”