California to open Sleep Train arena field hospital as COVID cases fill local hospitals
Faced with dramatically rising COVID-19 hospitalizations, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday the state will open the emergency field hospital at the Sleep Train Arena practice facility building in Sacramento’s Natomas area.
Opening day will be Wednesday, Dec. 9, he said, with the first 20 beds available.
The facility, set up in the summer, will be the first of 11 state urgency temporary field facilities that have been waiting in warm-up status since then. The hospitals were set up as a pressure-relief valve for local hospitals. Several others may open as well in the coming weeks, Brian Ferguson of the governor’s Office of Emergency Services said.
A recent surge in cases in Sacramento has filled Sacramento-area ICUs to 76% capacity as of Monday, with projections saying those units will fill beyond their maximum with a few weeks.
Elsewhere in Northern California, including Shasta, Del Norte, Lake Mendocino and Tehama counties, intensive care units had filled to about 85% capacity earlier this week, signaling potential imminent overload.
State officials said they are uncertain at this point whether Northern California hospitals or residential care sites will have any patients that they would like to send to the Sleep Train site on Dec. 9.
“It gives us flexibility if we are exceeding hospital capacity regionally,” Ferguson said. “We would be happy for it to stay vacant.”
The Sleep Train site is equipped to treat patients at “sub-acute” level of need, not those who require services of intensive care units. That nevertheless provides regular hospitals with more physical space and staffing to deal with ICU patients.
Patients to be treated at the field hospital could include both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients, Ferguson said.
The Sleep Train site, which the Sacramento Kings NBA team used before moving to Golden 1 Center, can house 20 patients in the practice facility and later, more than 200 more in the arena.
Medical supplies are available, and the state can call on both state and federal health care teams to assist.he state has 1,800 beds at the pop-up facilities.
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 1:01 PM.