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Urging people to stay home on New Year’s Eve, health officials shared a grim fact: There are only 28 beds available in intensive care units across Santa Clara County.
And as 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, said Dr Ahmad Kamal, the county’s director of COVID-19 health care preparedness on December 31.
“To put that into perspective, the case rate to come out of the purple level is a case rate of less than seven,” Kamal said. “The day before Halloween our case rate in Santa Clara County was 4.5. We are now 50 years old. “
As of December 31, the county had 67,423 cumulative cases of COVID-19 and 673 deaths.
Kamal said the case rate was overwhelming hospitals. He urged people to stay home for New Years Eve.
“What we are seeing now is not normal,” Kamal said. “It’s an order of magnitude more than what we saw just two months ago. We are clearly not out of the woods. We are in the thick of the woods.
Hospitals must now use emergency rooms to treat patients because intensive care units are so overcrowded, said Dr Marco Randazzo, emergency department physician at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose and the St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy.
“Often the only time we can move a patient to the ICU is when a COVID patient has died,” Randazzo said.
This surge is also putting healthcare workers at a higher risk of COVID-19 infection.
“We are proud of our dedication and our obligation to help every patient who requests care,” said Randazzo. “We do this knowing that our job can involve great personal risks for ourselves and even for our families.”
Despite the gloomy forecast for hospitals, Dr Marty Fenstersheib, the county’s testing manager, said healthcare providers were on track to give second doses to people who received vaccines in mid-December .
The county has received more than 94,805 COVID-19 vaccines, as well as additional doses to healthcare providers in several counties such as Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health.
But Fenstersheib said it would take the general public several months to access the vaccines. The county must first immunize all health care workers and essential commodities covered in the first phase of California.
“Our priority is to get each dose into someone’s arm,” Fenstersheib said. “We don’t want to sit down on any vaccine, as we’ve heard in other communities. We want to be a community that receives the vaccine and distributes it as soon as possible. “
Contact Mauricio La Plante at [email protected] or follow @mslaplantenews on Twitter.
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