The Board of Supervisors approved a lease to transform the old Sears building into a facility to treat patients with an overflow of COVID-19, but Santa Barbara County never implemented the agreement.
During the peak of local cases and hospitalizations in July, the county saw the empty store as a possible alternative care location for patients on the south coast.
The lease, which the Board of Supervisors approved, but was never executed, outlined a plan to transform the building into a 200-bed health center to serve patients if the county’s hospital system became overloaded.
The building at La Cumbre Plaza on 3845 State St. has been empty since Sears closed in January 2019.
“With regard to Sears as an alternative service location, that is not the direction of the state today,” Public Health Director Van Do-Reynoso told supervisors on Tuesday.
“We have the capacity to increase these days in our hospitals. If there is a need to have an alternative service website, we would partner and use what is available on the SLO’s alternative service website, if necessary, and this is a big ‘if necessary’.
“At the moment, our hospitals are very comfortable and prefer any expansion to provide patient care to be within its four walls and within its campus. The problem is getting staff.”
North County patients could be sent to the established (but never used) alternative care facility on Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo campus.
“When we looked at Sears as an option last year, that was a different time and a different space in the pandemic. It is no longer recommended or preferred at our community health providers or in the state given what we know for the treatment of hospitalized patients, ”said Do-Reynoso.
The Board of Supervisors approved the lease of the property in July, but the county subsequently decided not to execute the agreement, Assistant Director of General Services, Skip Gray, told Noozhawk by email on Tuesday.
“Once it was determined that the county no longer needed Sears property, we ended up not executing the contract or lease,” said Gray.
The agreement and letter of intent to lease the property include a “maintenance-free period” until August, he said.
“The county made the decision not to enter into the lease on August 28,” said Gray.
The county still has an agreement to use the Best Western hotel at 2220 Bath St. as an alternative treatment site near Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, but that has not been activated, said Gray.
Hospital outbreak plans
Do-Reynoso said that hospitals prefer to expand capacity within their own facilities, which is what they are doing with emergency plans.
Hospitals report the use of 13 intensive care unit beds for patients with COVID-19 today. About 64% of ICU patients in the municipality have COVID-19.
With 211 COVID-19 hospital patients, there is more than double now compared to the peak of the summer, which has worried authorities to the point of seeking alternative care facilities.
Cottage Health President and CEO Ron Werft last week described the work Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital did to convert the units into COVID-19 treatment areas and attract employees from other areas of the hospital.
There was a COVID-19 isolation unit operating at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital during Thanksgiving Day, and now there are five, including two ICU units, said Werft last week.
One of the ICU’s surgical units was converted into a unit to care for patients with COVID-19, he added.
The current challenge is to employ more staff than physical beds, say public health officials and hospitals.
“As we look at the growing demand for our hospitals in Santa Bárbara, beds will not be the challenge, PPE and ventilators will not be the challenge,” said Werft. “The problem is the intensive care team.
“Although we are with a team now beyond what we would normally see, the ability to identify, recruit and expand for this type of demand is very challenging.”
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