‘Fighting for their lives’: Lone Yuba-Sutter hospital flooded with COVID-19 patients
The rural Yuba-Sutter area in Northern California is facing a severe influx of coronavirus activity that is filling hospital beds at an alarming pace, the president of the bi-county region’s only hospital said this week.
Adventist Health/Rideout in Marysville was treating only three patients with confirmed cases of COVID-19 as recently as Nov. 10. Three days later on Friday, that total reached 10.
Now, Rideout is caring for at least 20 patients who have the virus, local health leaders said Tuesday. That’s one out of every 11 of the hospital’s 221 licensed beds — occupied or otherwise — currently filled with a coronavirus patient, data from the California Department of Public Health show.
Rideout President Rick Rawson, in a video message shared Tuesday via Sutter and Yuba’s bi-county public health office, pleaded for the community to take preventive actions to curb the spread of the virus before it overwhelms the hospital.
“There’s 20 people today, right now, a few blocks away from where I’m standing, fighting for their lives,” Rawson said. “This is something that is preventable through masks, social distancing and limiting social gatherings. And we know that. The science has proven that out.”
Rideout peaked at 30 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in early August, during the summer surge, state data show. But it didn’t arrive at that total until a month into its local surge, which started just after July 4. This time around, the figure has already jumped from three to 20 in one week.
The situation is becoming dire, and concern only increases when considering Sutter and Yuba counties’ skyrocketing case totals. Each of the last five days, from Friday through Tuesday, local health officials reported more than 70 new cases across the two counties, including a record 100 on Monday.
Those five days are the two counties’ five highest totals recorded during the entire pandemic, so there’s no immediate sign of new infections or related hospitalizations slowing down in the near future.
Exacerbating the situation, hospitals throughout most of California’s well-populated counties are seeing substantial increases in virus patients themselves. The Bee recently calculated that out of the 26 counties that combined for more than 96% of the state’s 4,118 COVID-19 hospitalizations through Tuesday, 23 counties have seen their coronavirus patient load surge more than 40% since Nov. 1. Two of the remaining three had it grow 30%. (San Francisco is the plateauing outlier.)
The long list includes all of Yuba-Sutter’s more populous immediate neighbors: Butte, Sacramento and Placer. In fact, all three of those counties have had their COVID-19 patient totals more than double since Nov. 1, and are experiencing some of the fastest spikes across the entire state.
Rideout is the only general acute care hospital in Sutter or Yuba. If it were to reach the point of having to turn away COVID-19 patients due to staffing or bed capacity concern, the two counties’ residents would have little option but to seek medical care in counties currently battling their own serious hospital surges, escalating burden.
Hospital systems across the state are expanding their surge capacities in efforts to prevent this very problem. Rideout is working to do so, “but it does put everybody under strain,” Rawson said.
The Yuba-Sutter area has some of the highest rates of COVID-19 activity in all of California during the current autumn surge, especially Sutter County, state data show.
In the CDPH assessment released this week, state health officials said Sutter reported close to 22 new daily cases per 100,000 residents for the week ending Nov. 10, with a test positivity of 10.9%. The latter was the third-highest among all 58 counties. Yuba recorded 14 new cases per 100,000 and its positivity rate was 8.2%.
‘Not a trade-off’: Sutter, Yuba have history of opposing restrictions
Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state on Monday announced a sweeping rollback in the economic reopening process, sending 28 counties spanning most parts of California back to the strictest purple tier, joining the 13 that were already in that stage. In the purple tier, counties are required to keep restaurant dining, gyms, places of worship, movie theaters and several other types of activities closed for indoor operations.
Even without the emergency reset, Sutter and Yuba failed to meet the criteria to stay in the red tier in the previous week’s update and would have been demoted this week based on their soaring numbers. Sutter County’s daily cases more than tripled the red-to-purple threshold, Yuba’s more than doubled it and both failed to keep positivity below the 8% cutoff.
Much earlier in the pandemic, in May, Sutter and Yuba counties squared off against the Newsom administration by openly defying the state’s orders to keep businesses including restaurants, hair salons and shopping malls closed statewide. Within days, state regulators descended upon the two counties to issue warnings.
The standoff was short-lived, though, because within a few weeks the state began rolling out a “regional variance” model that let counties with low rates of COVID-19 activity — at that point, a distinction that included Sutter, Yuba and numerous other less-densely-populated counties — partially reopen their economies ahead of the rest of the state. This allowed the above-listed establishments to open their doors once again.
Some government leaders in rural parts of California have opposed the statewide stay-at-home order. Several have argued that it is a one-size-fits-all solution that creates undue economic stress, especially for small business owners.
State Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City, criticized the restrictions Monday immediately after Newsom announced them.
“The Government can only take what you let them. I don’t think you should close your business, church or school,” said Gallagher, whose district includes all of Sutter, Yuba, Glenn and Tehama counties and who has been one of the state’s most vocal opponents of the coronavirus restrictions, in a written statement. “I would encourage you to keep them open.”
Rawson has a different view. In his video message, he called upon Sutter and Yuba residents to support and adhere to the returning restrictions.
“This is not a trade-off between our economy and our health,” he said. “Our health and our economy are interrelated.
“We need to care for each other as a community so we can have a strong economy that can open up.”
