As coronavirus cases continue to spiral across California, intensive care units at Marin County hospitals are at maximum capacity, with the last bed filling up Tuesday.
The county has 29 beds and 12 of those are occupied by COVID-19 patients.
Dr. Matt Willis said Tuesday that during the July surge, about a dozen COVID-19 patients occupied the ICU on a few days due to an outbreak at San Quentin Prison.
“This is the highest number of non-San Quentin patients we’ve had,” Willis said in his update to the board of supervisors posted on YouTube.
Up to 10% of those infected with the virus require hospitalization and those roughly a third need extra care in the ICU.
“Hospitalizations lag behind cases,” said Willis. “… We’re able to predict just by looking at case rates what our hospital experience is, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m so concerned because as we see increasing case rates, now that our hospitalizations are reaching capacity, we can anticipate that a week from now, two weeks from now, unless that surge in cases decreases our hospitals would be beyond capacity.”
This news comes as ICU capacity in the Bay Area region, comprising 11 counties, reached 15.8% Wednesday morning. When the region falls below 15%, all counties would be required to impose the state’s new stay-at-home order, banning travel and gatherings and closing most nonessential businesses except retail. Seven counties voluntarily adopted the order ahead of the state timeline, but Napa, Solano, San Mateo and Santa Cruz have opted to wait for the state mandate.
The regional ICU availability pulls an average from all 11 counties, and as of Wednesday morning, the capacity in individual jurisdictions varied widely. While San Francisco was at 31% capacity, Santa Clara’s was 9%.
Santa Clara’s Health Director Dr. Sara Cody addressed the dire situation in her county in a Board of Supervisors meeting and was overcome by tears as she reported the numbers.
“We’re in a place that we never expected to be and we certainly never wanted to be,” Cody said. “… Today, unfortunately, I mostly have very, very difficult news to share with you all … Today, we had over 1,000 new cases reported, and we crossed the 50,000 case mark. Fifty thousand people in our county. And today we are reporting 24 new deaths.”
Stopping for a moment, Cody went on and said through tears, “We have lost 553 people in our county. COVID in fact is on track to be among the five leading causes of death here in our county. Our pandemic locally is out of control.”