Sacramento hospitals ‘at capacity’ and COVID deaths at 6-month high as delta spreads
More Sacramento County residents have died of COVID-19 in the first three weeks of August than in any full calendar month since February, according to the county health office, as the highly contagious delta variant of coronavirus bombards the capital region with infections and fills up hospital beds.
The county’s data dashboard shows at least 76 confirmed coronavirus deaths this month. That’s nine more than all of March and on pace to more than double the fatality rate from April through July, a stretch that averaged a little less than 40 deaths a month.
County health officials on Wednesday confirmed 22 new deaths Wednesday and added eight more Thursday, with dates for all 30 of those fatalities ranging from Aug. 1 to Aug. 21. The addition brings the all-time death toll to 1,892 in a little less than 18 months.
“The hospitals are at capacity now,” Sacramento County health officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye said during a call with reporters Thursday. “We are concerned about the status and availability of both the general beds as well as the intensive care unit.”
Sacramento County hospitals went from treating 220 patients with COVID-19 on Aug. 1 to 428 by Aug. 17, according to data from the California Department of Public Health, with 413 hospitalized as of Thursday’s update. The number in intensive care units has more than doubled, from 51 to 106, since the start of the month.
Kasirye said the lack of beds means some patients will be sent to hospitals in other counties, and she repeated a plea for residents to “reserve the emergency room and ambulances for true emergencies only.”
Other hospitals in the region are also filling up. Placer County has exceeded its winter record for concurrent hospitalized patients with COVID-19, reaching 231 Monday compared to a peak of 216 last December. ICU patients were up to 49 as of Wednesday and Thursday’s state data updates, well above the previous high from January, which was 32.
Placer’s local health office on Wednesday issued a new advisory recommending high-quality masks indoors regardless of vaccination status, citing hospital strain and classroom closures early in the K-12 school year.
Health officer Dr. Rob Oldham in that advisory said confirmed virus cases are now occupying close to one-third of all licensed hospital beds in Placer County.
Soaring ICU cases also mean deaths in the two counties will likely continue to surge for at least several more weeks — through much of September and possibly beyond, depending on when new cases hit a peak.
“It does look like we’ve reached a plateau (in cases), but there might be a delay in some of our reports, so we’re still cautiously optimistic,” Kasirye said Thursday. The daily case rate has dropped slightly, from about 34 per 100,000 residents to 31.5 per 100,000, since the start of August, local health data show.
Hospitalized virus patients and ICU cases in Sacramento County are each about 80% of the way to their highest points from the winter surge, which saw nearly 400 county residents die of COVID-19 last December, more than 300 in January and close to 160 in February, county data show.
Deaths are trending younger than during the winter surge, Sacramento County epidemiology program manager Jamie White said on Thursday’s call. White did not have exact data available on age, but noted that older populations have the county’s highest vaccination rates and are therefore seeing lower death rates than the last surge.
Kaisrye also said earlier this month that the median age of hospitalizations in July was about a decade younger than during the peak of the winter surge — early 50s compared to early 60s.
How do vaccines, delta variant factor in?
For much of spring, the Sacramento region enjoyed some of its lowest rates for virus hospitalizations and deaths of the entire pandemic, as vaccines became widely available and infections plummeted.
But in the past two months, the highly infectious delta variant grew dominant. Experts have said delta is far more contagious than previous version of the virus, and CDPH reports it made up 93% of sampled cases in July and 98% in August.
New infections and hospitalizations began to skyrocket as delta took hold, now joined in their surge by fatalities.
State and local health officials continue to report that a vast majority of recent hospitalizations and deaths are coming among those who are not fully vaccinated.
Vaccines rolled out in the U.S. in mid-December. Sacramento County has recorded about 775 virus deaths since the start of 2021, with vaccination status reported for about 735 of them. Of those, only 13, or 1.8%, were fully vaccinated, according to the local health dashboard.
Sacramento and Placer counties also, in their most recent data available from July and August, reported that roughly 90% of the latest COVID-19 hospital admissions were not fully vaccinated.
Those percentages align very closely with findings from clinical trials, and with the current consensus among leading health experts: that all three vaccines available in the U.S. remain exceptionally effective in preventing severe illness and death from COVID-19, even as increasing numbers of breakthrough cases are reported.
Sacramento County reached the threshold of having more than 50% of its total population fully vaccinated in early August, a couple of weeks after Placer.
This story was originally published August 26, 2021 at 11:59 AM.
