‘A surge like we’ve never seen’: Sacramento hospitals brace for flood of coronavirus cases
Sacramento-area hospital leaders are bracing for a barrage of new patients infected with the coronavirus and suffering from COVID-19, a surge of cases they say is just days away and unlike any they have ever seen.
“We’re climbing this curve right now with the expectation that the first week of April is when we’ll see a crest,” said Laurie Harting, chief executive officer for Dignity Health Greater Sacramento. “I hope it’s not for certain, but, obviously, everybody has to plan for that.”
Surge at local Dignity hospitals used to be shorthand for extra staffing during an especially aggressive flu season.
No more. The rules have changed.
The death toll in California has reached 60. As of Wednesday, the state has confirmed 2,535 coronavirus cases, a nearly doubling of the previous day’s total as private labs begin being counted, Gov. Gavin Newsom said.
The shutdown that has so dramatically changed life in a state of 40 million people could now stretch into mid-June.
“COVID-19 has put us into an entirely new paradigm of what surge means,” Harting said. “This is a whole different ball game. What we’re talking about with COVID-19, if and when the surge hits Sacramento, we will need a whole different set of resources.”
Newsom has said the state will need to add 50,000 beds to the hospital system to treat COVID-19 patients atop the 75,000 beds already in the system encompassing everything from the naval medical ship Mercy docked at Los Angeles; to beds in converted parking lots; to the outpatient surgical bays soon to be pressed into action at Dignity Health.
Added to that mix are yet more layers: canceling planned closures of medical centers; pressing emptied hotels and motels into service, and using field hospitals on U.S. soil.
Closed hospitals coming online
On Wednesday, Newsom announced that Seton Medical Center in Daly City, slated to be shut down just weeks ago, has reopened. State Health and Human Services officials, in a statement, said the hospital will begin accepting as many as 220 COVID-19 patients. The state is leasing the hospital for three months.
“That is a significant milestone,” Newsom said during a Wednesday news briefing. “Seton is now being staffed by extraordinary heroes: our doctors and nurses.”
A second 90-day lease deal secured a second hospital, St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, health and human services officials said, with plans to care for up to 366 patients “as soon as possible.”
The state is also in “advanced conversations” on sites in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Riverside to erect field stations that would add another 2,000 beds to the inventory, Newsom said Wednesday.
Jan Emerson-Shea, spokeswoman for the California Hospital Association, said the governor was “being very frank and kind of stark with what it could look like. ... We’re doing everything we can to avoid reaching that level. Having said that, it’s very clear that we are going to be facing a surge in patients like we have never seen before”
Doctors, nurses, beds, equipment, capacity. Hospitals like Harting’s will need all of it and then some and are leaning into a take on the Marines axiom: Improvise, adapt, overcome.
Roughly 3,600 licensed hospital beds are in the four-county Sacramento region, according to the California Department of Public Health database.
At UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, leaders anticipate the campus very well could take on the look and mission of a M.A.S.H. unit. The hospital has teamed with the state and local emergency managers, and is prepared to set up three mobile field tents to expand the numbers of on-campus beds, leaders told The Sacramento Bee in a Tuesday statement.
Plans to convert other areas of the hospital and campus into additional spaces to care for patients are also in the works.
How many beds the planned conversions will provide will depend on a variety of factors, UC Davis medical officials said, including how the facilities are laid out, patient need, available equipment and staffing.
‘Every resource we have’
At Dignity Health’s hospitals, elective surgeries are off the board — freeing valuable rooms to absorb the surge. Surgical nurses are getting training right now to help shoulder the load in emergency rooms and critical care.
CMOs — chief medical officers — are leading more training of physicians so they can better handle the expected flood of critical care patients.
“All of our ambulatory surgery sites are like small separate hospitals that do just outpatient surgeries,” Harting explained. Because the rooms have been freed up, “we’re looking at converting them to 11 additional sites where we could care for patients when the surge hits,” she said.
Sutter Health and Kaiser Permanente each are also growing their surge capacity. In a statement, Kaiser officials said they are taking “aggressive and proactive action” to find more beds including increasing capacity and assessing “non-traditional spaces” in and around medical centers.
Sutter Health said they are focusing “every resource we have” on preparing for a surge in patients.
While every hospital has a surge element as part of their disaster plan to identify how they can increase the numbers of patients they receive, Emerson-Shea said, those emergency plans were designed for earthquakes, fires or floods.
“No one ever saw this coming so hospitals are being asked to figure out how they can find room for way more patients than we ever envisioned in our surge planning,” Emerson-Shea said. “That is happening.”
This story was originally published March 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
.JPG)