Over the past month, the number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized from the virus in Santa Barbara County has increased sixfold, and the number of patients in the ICU is more than 10 times what it was a month ago.
As of Dec. 14, 75 people were hospitalized, including 21 in the ICU. One month prior on Nov. 14, 12 were hospitalized with two in the ICU.
This isn’t the first time that the county has seen this many hospitalized with the virus. On July 13, for example, 76 people were hospitalized. A month prior to that, on June 13, 51 were hospitalized. This means the rate of increase during that month-long period was about 50 percent. What’s different now is that the rate of increase is much larger over the same period of time. Going from 12 hospitalized to 75 in a month makes the rate of increase 525 percent.
The county also continues to see sharp increases in other COVID-19 metrics.
“We are experiencing a steep rise in case rate, from 14.4 to 19.2 in one rating period, which is equivalent to about a 33 percent increase,” Public Health Director Dr. Van Do-Reynoso said at the Dec. 15 Board of Supervisors meeting. “Our testing positivity also is increasing, going from 4.6 to this week’s 6.1, and that denotes a 36 percent increase. Our health equity metric went from 6.2 to now 8.3, denoting an increase of 34 percent.”
These percent increases are over a one week period. In the past month, the adjusted case rate has increased by more than 150 percent, and the positivity rate by about the same percentage.
Do-Reynoso said that about 30 percent of hospital beds in the tri-county area remain open. However, she added that the county anticipates fewer beds available in the coming weeks as hospitalization and ICU rates catch up to continuously skyrocketing case rates. There is typically a two- to three-week lag, she said.
With the Central Coast still maintaining significantly more hospital space than the rest of the Southern California region, Ventura, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara counties sent a letter to the state asking that the area be considered as a separate region in the state’s reopening system. The county hasn’t received a response, officials reported at the board meeting.
At the Dec. 15 meeting, 4th District Supervisor Peter Adam questioned public health officials about the accuracy of COVID-19 testing, particularly the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test that is mostly commonly used.
Do-Reynoso said the typical range for false positives is from 0.8 percent to 4 percent.
“False positives can be a result of different PCR tests, which have different types of sensitivities,” she said. “It is also further influenced and determined by the prevalence of disease in the community, what type of swabs are used, and how quickly the test is run after collection, and by the lab processing.”
Public Health Officer Dr. Henning Ansorg added that given Santa Barbara County’s percent positivity rate still being under 10 percent, “the false positives are really negligible.”
“With respect to the public health, we’d rather have a false positive than a false negative,” he continued. “False negatives are actually a bigger problem than false positives, because we could miss patients who have minor symptoms or no symptoms, and still be contagious.”
This article appears in Dec 17-24, 2020.