Record number in state’s hospitals
Virus patients surge as new Bay Area curbs begin
California hospitals treated a record number of coronavirus patients this weekend, as the surge accelerated and counties frantically imposed new restrictions.
State officials reported 7,415 virus hospitalizations Saturday, the latest data available, a singleday increase of more than 400 and well above the state’s previous record of 7,170, set in July.
“It’s obviously concerning,” said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at UCSF. “This is one of those things we’re trying to avoid is overwhelming hospitals.”
Nationwide, hospitalizations reached another record Saturday — 91,635, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
In California, COVID19 hospitalizations more than doubled in two weeks. The number of people in intensive care units because of the coronavirus also neared a record.
Meanwhile, residents of San
Francisco and San Mateo County faced a 10 p. m. to 5 a. m. curfew starting Monday, as both places entered the state’s restrictive purple tier of coronavirus rules — a category now shared by all Bay Area counties except Marin. Indoor gyms, churches, museums and movie theaters were forced to close Sunday in both counties. Indoor dining in San Mateo County also shut down — meaning that restaurantgoers can no longer eat indoors anywhere in the Bay Area.
At the spacious Fitness SF gym in San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center, members got one last indoor workout in Sunday morning before the noon shutdown, which could last months. The gym was fully booked with reservations until noon, with 80 members per hour working out.
General Manager Ken Brendel spent the early afternoon furloughing about 20 employees.
“This is not what I want to be doing today,” Brendel said. “It’s right before the holidays. There is no stimulus for these folks to fall back on. It’s just really, really unfortunate and sad.”
Fitness SF continued to operate an outdoor space on Natoma Street.
The rules — which are even stricter in Santa Clara County, which began requiring returning travelers to quarantine and slashed capacity in nonessential stores to 10% — are necessary to keep hospitals from overflowing, experts say.
“The hope is that by essentially skipping Thanksgiving and adding the curfews and additional restrictions, we’re putting the brakes on this and we can start turning the curve down on new cases, which will mean there will be fewer hospitalizations and fewer deaths,” Rutherford said. “We just have to stay tuned to see how it happens.”
Bay Area hospitalizations stood at 759 Saturday — not far from the late July record of 815. If new cases keep rising at the current rates, many more hospital beds will fill up, despite an improvement in treatment options since the beginning of the pandemic.
On Sunday, Santa Clara County recorded 560 new cases — one of its highest totals ever, though smaller than the record 760 new cases recorded Saturday. Dr. Sara Cody, the county health officer, said Saturday that the county was “at risk of exceeding our hospital capacity very soon if current trends continue.”
Dr. Ahmad Kamal, director of health care preparedness in the Santa Clara County Emergency Operations Center, told The Chronicle that staffing is a constant concern at the 10 county hospitals.
“This pandemic is everywhere, and unlike earlier, where surges would happen in one place and surgeons and doctors could move around, it is happening everywhere,” he said.
Ten percent of people diagnosed with COVID19 end up in the hospital, and in the early stages of the pandemic onethird of these would end up in the intensive care unit, Kamal said. That number has decreased to onefourth because of drug treatments that can be administered through IV in the hospital or in doctors’ offices. This has cut down on the need for ventilator treatment in the ICU.
“We have learned that putting a breathing tube in is not the best course of action,” he said.
The Bay Area will experience a surge of coronavirus cases in two weeks that can be attributed to Thanksgiving, and the upward trend is expected to continue through December and into January, according to UC Berkeley infectious disease expert John Swartzberg. “Holidays have come at the worst time of the year,” he said. “All of us are completely exhausted emotionally with COVID, and here we are in our favorite part of the year, and we want so much to enjoy it and be with people we love — you combine all that, and what you get is people doing the wrong things.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, warned on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that with holiday gatherings under way despite heath officers’ pleas, “We may see a surge upon a surge.”
Still, Swartzberg said that despite the dramatic increase in coronavirus cases in the Bay Area, the region is faring better than the rest of the state because of slower virus spread throughout the year.
Bay Area hospitals still have beds, medical staff and ICU facilities available. In Southern California, hospitals also have the means to handle new cases, but facilities are reaching capacity much faster.
Swartzberg said that if coronavirus cases continue to climb at the current rate, the Bay Area will experience a drastic increase in hospitalizations within two weeks and a higher rate of deaths around Christmas.
“People in public health and medicine are so worried about where we are right now because we’re really looking at two to four weeks down the road,” Swartzberg said. “If we could just stop things right now, where we are, we’d be OK.”