In urging people to stay home on New Year’s Eve, health officials shared an unpleasant fact: there are only 28 intensive care unit beds available in all of Santa Clara County.
And although the county has received nearly 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines, infection rates continue to rise.
The case rate is 50 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, announced Dr. Ahmad Kamal, the county’s COVID-19 health care preparation director on December 31.
“To put this in perspective, the rate of cases to get out of the purple layer is less than seven cases,” said Kamal. “The day before Halloween, our case rate in Santa Clara County was 4.5. We are now 50. ”
As of December 31, the county recorded 67,423 cumulative cases of COVID-19 and 673 deaths.
Kamal said the case rate is crushing hospitals. He asked people to stay home on New Year’s Eve.
“What we are seeing now is not normal,” said Kamal. “It is an order of magnitude more than we saw just two months ago. Clearly, we are not out of danger. We are in the middle of the forest. “
Hospitals now need to use emergency rooms to care for patients because ICUs are overcrowded, said Dr. Marco Randazzo, a doctor in the emergency department at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose and St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy.
“Often, the only time when we can move a patient to the ICU is when a COVID patient dies,” said Randazzo.
The increase also puts healthcare professionals at a higher risk of COVID-19 infection.
“We are proud of our dedication and obligation to help each patient who seeks care,” said Randazzo. “We do this with the understanding that our line of work can present a great personal risk for us and even for our families.”
Despite the bleak forecast for hospitals, the county testing officer, Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, said health workers are on their way to administer a second dose to people who received the vaccines in mid-December.
The county received more than 94,805 COVID-19 vaccines, in addition to additional doses for healthcare providers in several counties, such as Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health.
But Fenstersheib said it would take several months for the general public to have access to vaccines. The county must first vaccinate all health workers and essentials covered in California’s first phase.
“Our priority is to put each dose on someone’s arm,” said Fenstersheib. “We don’t want to sit on any vaccine, as we’ve heard in other communities. We want to be a community that receives the vaccine and distributes it as quickly as possible ”.
Contact Mauricio La Plante at [email protected] or follow @mslaplantenews on Twitter.