‘Didn’t have to be this way’: Yuba hospital ICU at 142% capacity due to COVID surge
For the second time in less than a month, the president of a rural Northern California hospital is pleading with his community to get vaccinated, as his facility grows even more overwhelmed with critically ill COVID-19 patients clinging to life on ventilators.
Rick Rawson, president of Adventist Health and Rideout in the Yuba County seat of Marysville, said in a video update Wednesday that the hospital was treating 79 COVID-19 patients.
That surpasses the high of 73 recorded at the peak of last winter’s surge, state health data show, and it also means more than one-third of the hospital’s 221 licensed beds are occupied by virus patients.
Adventist-Rideout is the only general acute care hospital in the Yuba-Sutter bi-county region, where about 180,000 people live.
Rawson said the hospital has had to transfer patients to hospitals in other counties because all of its beds are full. But, as The Sacramento Bee recently reported, many other sparsely populated counties north of Sacramento and the Bay Area are also seeing their hospitals fill up.
Adventist-Rideout’s intensive care unit was at 142% capacity; the facility has only 24 ICU beds but was treating 34 intensive care patients, digging deep into surge and overflow protocols.
Twenty of the 34 were COVID-19 patients, all of them on ventilators, and 95% of them (19 of 20) are unvaccinated, Rawson said.
“The low rates of vaccination are significantly contributing to the surge,” he said. “Many of them, when they come into the hospital, they realize the serious situation they’re in and want the vaccination, but at that point it’s too late.”
Only about 44% of Sutter County residents and 35% of Yuba County residents are fully vaccinated, well below the statewide rate of 57%, according to the latest California Department of Public Health data.
“We don’t see this letting up. In fact, our numbers have gone up significantly just in the last three days,” said Rawson, who is retiring at the end of October.
CDPH reported that the two counties’ average daily case rates over the past week, 71 per 100,000 residents in Yuba and 63 per 100,000 in Sutter, ranked second- and third-worst among the state’s 58 counties, only ahead of Del Norte County, which also faces a dire hospital crisis.
The bi-county health office in a Wednesday update said Sutter and Yuba combined for nearly 1,700 active cases, the most at any point in the pandemic. It also confirmed the 122nd and 123rd virus deaths among Sutter residents to date, and the 52nd among Yuba residents.
“This didn’t have to be this way, and we see a direct correlation of how the delta variant is moving through the unvaccinated population in Yuba and Sutter counties,” Rawson said.
Rawson put out a video at the start of August, when his hospital had 22 COVID-19 patients with six in intensive care, saying the Yuba-Sutter region has “lost too many people in this community to date, and we don’t need to lose any more.” He urged people to get vaccinated.
Last November, at the outset of the winter surge and a month before vaccines deployed, he pleaded with residents to wear masks, limit gatherings and adhere to social distancing. All three video messages were posted to YouTube by Yuba-Sutter health officer Dr. Phuong Luu.
Rawson asked residents to “consider the risk we continue to put ourselves under.”
“This may not end even when this surge goes on the downslope,” he warned. “This could come back again.”
