‘It is frightening.’ Major Sacramento hospital braces for surge as COVID cases soar
Health leaders at UC Davis Medical Center are sounding the alarm on the Sacramento region’s exploding rate of COVID-19 cases, with one official calling it “hard to tell” whether the situation will grow as bad as the dire surge California experienced last winter.
“A Sacramento-area COVID-19 surge is likely, given the highly contagious (Delta) variant and the low vaccination rate,” UC Davis Health wrote in a news release sent Thursday.
About 48% of Sacramento County residents are fully vaccinated, compared to 53% statewide, according to California Department of Public Health data. About 54% in the county, but 61% statewide, have had at least one dose.
The health system said its downtown Sacramento research hospital was treating fewer than 10 virus patients on a daily basis throughout most of June, but that it has now seen between 18 and 25 each day this week.
Most are unvaccinated.
“It is frightening,” Christian Sandrock, director of critical care at UC Davis Medical Center, said in a prepared statement. “I don’t think we’ll go back to the worst we’ve seen, due to the vaccine, but it’s hard to tell.”
Worry centers around the Delta variant, which state health officials reported Thursday has accounted for 83% of samples tested for variants in July. Experts say Delta is highly contagious, but that vaccines are maintaining high efficacy against it.
Lorena Garcia, a UC Davis epidemiology professor, wrote that the Delta surge “could be extremely devastating” to California communities with low vaccination rates, especially in rural areas with limited health care resources.
“We already have an example in what is occurring around the world in low income countries where the vaccine is not available for the poor,” Garcia wrote. “The preventable deaths and severe illness are overwhelming. The impact will be felt for decades to come.”
The statewide total for COVID-19 patients in an ICU has swelled from 318 to 575 in the past two weeks, the state health department reported Thursday. In just the past week, the figure has jumped 52%.
California had about 4,900 virus cases in intensive care during the peak of its winter surge in January. That surge strained hospitals’ ICU capacity in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley for weeks.
While the latest tally remains more than eight times lower than January’s, the total could approach worrisome levels very quickly if cases continue to grow exponentially, as they have in recent weeks. California’s seven-day average for new cases quadrupled from 870 to 3,500 between June 14 and July 14, and test positivity has almost quintupled from 1% to 4.9% in the past month.
The recent hospitalization increase has been observed throughout the state. Over the past week, the number of COVID-19 patients in an ICU increased across 28 of the 45 California counties with at least 50 total hospital beds, according to state health data updated Thursday.
ICU counts increased by double or more in seven of those counties, two of them large: Riverside’s total jumped from 15 to 32, and San Francisco’s from six to 17.
Locally, Sacramento County’s intensive care total increased from 22 to 34, and El Dorado’s moved from one to four. Placer County held steady at 13 patients.
Yolo County had 12 COVID-19-positive patients hospitalized Thursday. Two of the hospitalized cases are “vaccine breakthroughs,” county spokesman Frank Schneegas told The Sacramento Bee in an emailed response, and one of those two was in an ICU.
Hospitalized breakthrough cases are still believed to be rare, though, and state and local health officials continue to emphasize that vaccines provide substantial protection against severe COVID-19, including Delta. CDPH in an early July statement said that of the 20 million residents fully vaccinated to that point, only 584 — 0.003% — had contracted COVID-19 and then required hospitalization.
“A number of younger patients, when they come in to us, critically ill, they start saying ‘I should have gotten the vaccine,’” said Sandrock, the UC Davis Medical critical care director. “We are seeing a lot of that. As they start to get really sick, they’re like, ‘Why did I not get the vaccine? Why did I not listen?’
“I’d say more than half of them do that.”
