Sleep Train Arena in Sacramento may soon be needed as a hospital. Here’s what we know
If local hospital beds fill up substantially due to the current surge of coronavirus activity, doctors and nurses may soon start treating patients at the former home of the Sacramento Kings.
In a relatively unique arrangement established months ago, parts of Sleep Train Arena and its adjacent practice facility in Natomas were refashioned in spring as an emergency hospital (formally, an “alternate care facility”) for COVID-19 patients.
Sleep Train didn’t get much use at all in the spring or summer, but the ongoing surge has already dwarfed earlier periods of the pandemic and is now threatening a far-worse hospital crisis.
California enters December with over 8,200 confirmed COVID-19 cases hospitalized, a record for the pandemic and a total that more than tripled during November. Almost 1,900 were in ICUs, with only a little over 1,900 more intensive care beds remaining available as of a Tuesday update.
Totals for COVID-19 patients in general hospital beds and in ICUs are climbing rapidly in the Sacramento region, where infections have been pouring in at a furious pace since about mid-November.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a virtual news conference Monday, shared projections from the state showing California could run out of ICU beds by mid-December. The greater Sacramento area could hit its limit by about Christmas, he said.
So, how and to what extent might Sleep Train Arena be used?
Here’s what we know.
How many beds are available?
Sleep Train Arena has no beds currently in use but 244 in “warm status,” according to state data from California’s Open Data Portal updated Tuesday.
Health officials are on standby, and California Office of Emergency Services officials recently indicated they could expand Sleep Train’s capacity to about 360 total beds, staffing them using state and federal health care teams.
For context on those numbers, Sacramento County as of Tuesday had 344 overall hospitalized virus patients. In neighboring Placer County, 131 virus patients were hospitalized.
Sleep Train Arena — which for many years during its NBA stint was known as ARCO Arena — popped up 328 beds during its overflow hospital use in the spring.
What is ‘warm status’? Will beds be ready in time?
All beds at the arena have been “warm” for more than five months. Warm status means those beds can be activated with about one day’s notice.
Sleep Train Arena is one of 11 overflow hospital facilities across California that Newsom mentioned Monday as capable of being activated to handle the December surge.
The 11 sites combine for close to 1,900 beds spread throughout the Bay Area, Central Valley and Southern California, with the vast majority of those beds currently empty but in “warm” status. A federal medical station in Imperial County was the only one out of the 11 treating patients as of the start of this week.
Will the site be just for COVID-19 patients?
Brian Ferguson of the state Office of Emergency Services recently told The Bee that surge sites like Sleep Train Arena “could be (for) COVID or non-COVID patients, depending on the need on the ground.”
State Health and Human Services spokesman Rodger Butler said in an email none of the nearly 1,900 beds currently set up at the 11 surge sites are ICU beds, which are the kind in dwindling supply statewide. The added general surge capacity could help free up numerous hospital systems’ resources and equipment for intensive care.
How was Sleep Train used earlier in the pandemic?
State data on surge facility use show that the Sleep Train site hardly treated any patients during spring and none at all during summer.
Despite having hundreds of beds ready, the overflow site treated six or fewer people almost any given day from May through early June.
The facility peaked at 10 concurrent patients in mid-May, and it last handled a patient June 12.
Are any other arenas being used as field hospitals?
Sleep Train is the only former sports arena among the 11 surge sites currently set up by the state.
Eight are designated as “federal medical stations” (two in San Francisco, and one in each of Contra Costa, Fresno, Imperial, Riverside, San Diego and San Mateo counties), and two as “alternative care sites” (one in each of Orange and Tulare counties).
The sites in Contra Costa and Riverside each had 250 warm beds as of Monday. Seven others had fewer than the Sacramento site’s 244, ranging from 125 to 200. And one of the two San Francisco sites is in “cold status,” meaning no warm beds.
Why Sleep Train? How did the field hospital come to be?
Transforming a former pro basketball stadium into a full-fledged field hospital was obviously no easy or inexpensive feat.
Hundreds of workers, from the National Guard to the California Conservation Corps to Kings employees, loaded tons upon tons of sporting equipment out of the arena and hospital equipment into the arena during April to prepare for patients.
It was a fairly logical choice for an emergency hospital site: large, in a state of disuse since late 2016 when the Kings made Golden 1 Center their new home, and in a relatively centralized location within the greater capital region.
After it initially appeared that the NBA team had donated use of the site to the state for free, it emerged in May that the Kings were actually only providing use of their adjacent practice gym at no cost. Meanwhile, they were charging $500,000 a month for a three-month rental agreement on the arena itself.
The team then announced that it would stop charging rent and allow the state free use of the main arena site through the end of October, though it kept the $1 million already paid.
October has ended, but the Kings organization continues to donate the practice facility. During the spring setup, the practice gym was the building planned for use as the makeshift hospital site.
This story was originally published December 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story referred to the hospital beds at Sleep Train Arena and other state-established surge sites as intensive care unit beds. The surge sites only contain general hospital beds, with no ICU beds currently set up at any of the 11 surge locations, a California Health and Human Services official told The Bee on Wednesday.
