The Board of Supervisors approved a lease to turn the former Sears building into a facility to treat overflow COVID-19 patients, but Santa Barbara County never executed the agreement.
During the July spike in local cases and hospitalizations, the county saw the vacant store as a potential alternate care site for South Coast patients.
The lease agreement, which the Board of Supervisors approved but was never executed, outlined a plan to upgrade the building into a 200-bed healthcare facility to serve patients if the countywide hospital system was overwhelmed.
The building in La Cumbre Plaza, at 3845 State St., has been empty since Sears closed in January 2019.
“With regards to the Sears as an alternate care site, that is not the direction of the state currently,” Public Health Director Van Do-Reynoso told the supervisors on Tuesday.
“We have surge capacity currently in our hospitals. If the need comes for us to have an alternate care site, we would partner up and utilize what’s available in the SLO alternate care site if needed, and that’s a huge ‘if needed.’
“Right now, our hospitals are quite comfortable and prefer that any expansion to do patient care is within their four walls and within their campus. The issue is getting staff.”
North County patients could be sent to the alternate care site established (but never used) at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo’s campus.
“When we pursued the Sears as an option last year, that was a different time and a different space in the pandemic. It is no longer recommended or preferred in our community healthcare providers or the state given what we know for treatment for hospitalized patients,” Do-Reynoso said.
The Board of Supervisors approved the lease for the property in July, but the county later decided not to execute the agreement, General Services Assistant Director Skip Grey told Noozhawk in an email Tuesday.
“Once it was determined the county no longer needed the Sears property, we ended up not executing the agreement or lease,” Grey said.
The agreement and letter of intent to lease the property included a “no-cost holding period” through August, he said.
“The county made the decision to not enter into the lease on Aug. 28,” Grey said.
The county still has an agreement to use the Best Western hotel at 2220 Bath St. as an alternate care site near Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, but that has not been activated, Grey said.
Hospital Surge Plans
Do-Reynoso said hospitals prefer to expand capacity within their own facilities, which is what they are doing with surge plans.
Hospitals report using 13 surge intensive care unit beds for COVID-19 patients currently. About 64% of ICU patients in the county have COVID-19.
With 211 COVID-19 hospital patients, there are more than twice as many now compared to the summertime peak that worried officials to the point of pursuing alternate care sites.
Cottage Health President and CEO Ron Werft last week described the work Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital has done to convert units into COVID-19 treatment areas and pull staff from other areas of the hospital.
There was one COVID-19 isolation unit operating at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital over Thanksgiving, and now there are five, including two ICU units, Werft said last week.
One of the surgical ICU units was converted to a unit to care for COVID-19 patients, he added.
The current challenge is staffing more than physical beds, public health and hospital officials say.
“As we look to the rising demands for our hospitals in Santa Barbara, beds are not going to be the challenge, PPE and ventilators are not going to be the challenge,” Werft said. “The problem is critical care staffing.
“While we’re staffed right now beyond what we’d normally see, the ability to identify, recruit and expand up to that kind of demand is very challenging.”
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.