As Santa Barbara County’s staffed ICU beds continue to dwindle, health professionals say it may be only a matter of time before area hospitals reach capacity.
“We, in a sense, are starting to catch up with LA,” Cottage Health infectious disease specialist Dr. David Fisk said. “Our COVID numbers have gotten so much worse and are starting to approach rates of hospitalization and ICU usage like they’re seeing.”
Fisk said that Santa Barbara County reaching hospital capacity is “a distinct possibility, if not a probability.”
On Dec. 21, the county reported that 102 people were hospitalized due to COVID-19, the first time that number has been in the triple digits. Just a week later on Dec. 28, 121 were hospitalized, nearly a 20 percent increase.
Cottage Health faced “significant staffing challenges to continue to man ICU and floor beds appropriately due to staff being sick from COVID,” Fisk said, and he expects hospitalization to only grow following winter holidays.
“We know that hospitalizations lag behind diagnoses by a couple of weeks, so given that we’re seeing so many positive community test results, we fully expect hospitalizations to continue to increase in the coming weeks,” Fisk said. “The fact that people have been mixing and mingling more with friends and loved ones around the holidays, unfortunately, means we’re going to be seeing much greater hospitalizations.”
The county recently shifted from reporting the total number of beds available to how many staffed beds are available, a change that Public Health Officer Dr. Henning Ansorg said is long overdue and reveals a more troubling reality about what local hospitals are dealing with.
“The hospital bed, the ventilator, the suction machine, it’s all very nice equipment, but it’s useless if you don’t have trained staff to utilize it,” Ansorg said. “It’s much more important at this time to say, if push came to shove, everybody works double shifts and whatnot, how many ICU beds could we actually staff at the moment? That number is pretty much half of [total beds].”
As of the morning of Dec. 29, Ansorg said that 12 out of 72 staffed ICU beds were open in Santa Barbara County, meaning there’s about 16 percent capacity remaining. But that number can turn “on a dime.”
“Just Cottage Hospital alone has more than 70 people hospitalized for COVID,” he said. “So if any of those turn the corner for the worse and all of a sudden they need to be in the ICU, those remaining beds can be changed during the day. It’s a very slim margin.”
Ansorg pleaded for community members to stay vigilant and do their part to slow the spread.
“Please, please, please wear your mask,” he said. “Don’t gather. I know New Year’s is coming up, but it’s incredibly risky behavior.”
This article appears in Dec 31, 2020 – Jan 7, 2021.