Health officials urgently urged people to stay home on New Year’s Eve: there are only 28 beds for intensive care units in the entire Santa Clara province.
And although the country has received nearly 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines, infection rates continue to rise.
The case percentage is at 50 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, said dr. Ahmad Kamal, the COVID-19 director of health preparedness in the country, announced on December 31st.
“To put this in perspective, the rate is less than seven to get out of the press level,” Kamal said. ” The day before Halloween, our case in Santa Clara County was 4.5. We are now at 50. ”
As of December 31, the province had 67,423 cumulative COVID-19 cases and 673 deaths.
Kamal said the case is overwhelming for hospitals. He urged people to stay home on New Year’s Eve.
“What we are seeing now is not normal,” Kamal said. ‘It’s a bigger order than we saw just two months ago. We are clearly not out of the woods. We are in the bushveld. ”
Hospitals now have to use emergency rooms to care for patients because the ICUs are so overrun, said dr. Marco Randazzo, an emergency physician at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose and St. John’s Regional Hospital. Louise in Gilroy, said.
“The only time we can move a patient to the ICU is when a COVID patient has died,” Randazzo said.
The boom also puts health workers at higher risk for COVID-19 infection.
“We are proud of our commitment and commitment to helping every patient who cares,” Randazzo said. “We do it with the understanding that our work can pose a great personal risk to ourselves and even our family.”
Despite the grim prediction for hospitals, the dr. Provincial testing officer Marty Fenstersheib said healthcare providers are on track to give second doses to people who received vaccinations in mid-December.
The province has received more than 94,805 COVID-19 vaccines, plus additional doses to healthcare providers such as Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health.
But Fenstersheib said it would take several months before the general public had access to vaccines. The county must first vaccinate all health care and emergency workers treated in California’s first phase.
“Our priority is to bring every dose into someone’s arm,” Fenstersheib said. ‘We do not want to sit on any vaccine, as we have heard in other communities. We want to be a community that gets the vaccine and can get it out as soon as possible. ‘
Contact Mauricio La Plante by [email protected] or follow @mslaplantenews on Twitter.