Riverside County is using 100% of its hospital intensive care unit capacity as of Monday, Dec. 14, a spokesman said, but that doesn’t mean the countywide system is completely out of beds.
Hospitals are implementing surge plans that include converting other beds into intensive care beds — even though they aren’t licensed for that use — and eliminating elective surgeries, Riverside County public health spokesman Jose Arballo Jr. said.
He wasn’t sure how many hospitals had already stopped elective surgeries, but some had done so weeks earlier as the case counts and hospitalization figures began climbing upward.
San Bernardino County also had 0% of its capacity remaining Monday under the state’s official designation — which doesn’t include available intensive care beds for infants and children and is tweaked if a disproportionate number of beds are being used for COVID-19 patients — spokesman David Wert said. But 10.1% of the county’s total ICU beds are available, down from 11.1% the day before, he said.
Overflow field hospitals prepared at a closed Sears in Riverside and the county fairgrounds in Indio had equipment ready but were not yet activated, Arballo said.
“Right now there are no plans to do that,” Arballo said. “We have the equipment ready to go if we need it, but we don’t have the staff.”
The 100% capacity figure refers to the number of ICU patients countywide compared to the number of licensed beds, said Shane Reichardt, a spokesman for the Emergency Management Department.
People in some hospitals are using neonatal intensive care unit beds or pediatric intensive care unit beds, which have to be modified for adult use and aren’t counted toward ICU capacity, he said.
“We don’t have people out in the halls, but we might be repurposing beds for the NICU and PICU – pediatric beds,” Reichardt said.
It’s rare for county hospitals to reach 100% of their listed capacity, Reichardt said. They were at full capacity once earlier during the pandemic, in July.
He and Arballo didn’t immediately have the number of ICU beds available in the county.
Some hospitals may be over capacity, while others have a few beds available, Arballo said.
“While the county overall might be at 0%, individual hospitals will probably have capacity,” he said. “You might have one or two hospitals that are in the upper 90s or lower 90s (percent of ICU beds in use).”
The county had 4.3% of its ICU beds available as of Friday, Dec. 11.
Riverside County had 184 patients in ICU beds with confirmed COVID-19 cases and another seven suspected patients according to state statistics from Sunday, the most recent day for which data is available. The statistics included 19 of the 21 facilities in Riverside County.
San Bernardino had a record 264 patients in intensive care with confirmed COVID-19 and another five with suspected cases as of Sunday.