For first time in 2 years, some Sacramento-area ICUs go days without a COVID-19 patient
For the first time in more than two years, UC Davis Health said its hospital had no COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit for two consecutive days, and other local hospitals said their ICUs had seen a similar trend.
“The first COVID patient to arrive in our ICU did so in February 2020, and the unit treated at least one positive individual every day since for at least 761 consecutive days,” UC Davis leaders said Thursday.
Dr. Parimal Bharucha, a pulmonary and critical care doctor who practices with Dignity Health, said: ‘I’m at Folsom, and we have no patients in the ICU with COVID.”
Bharucha is the director of the ICU at Mercy Folsom Hospital and chairman of the department of medicine at Mercy San Juan Medical Center. He said they are now finding that many patients with COVID-19 were actually admitted for other emergent conditions but were incidentally diagnosed with COVID-19 because all patients are tested for it.
This is a far cry from where things stood a few months ago.
In January, California was seeing record high numbers of cases as a result of a surge in the omicron variant of COVID-19. California Department of Public Health data showed an average of 110,967 statewide on Jan. 19, but there has been a precipitous plunge in those numbers.
As recently as Wednesday, the average number of daily cases in California was 1,959. ICU hospitalizations were reported at 2,609 statewide on Jan. 26 but had fallen to 256 on Wednesday.
“This pandemic has been one of the hardest challenges many of our staff have ever faced yet they’ve continuously demonstrated their dedication and resilience,” said Toby Marsh, the chief nursing and patient care services officer at UC Davis Health. “We hope the ICU COVID numbers are indicative of a sustained change.”
‘Fully open’ in Sacramento-area ICUs
Bharucha said he, too, hopes the time of uncontrolled surges is over.
“We have taken down the makeshift tents or the barriers that we had,” he said Thursday, “Today was the first day when everything is gone from the Folsom ICU. It is back to how it was two years ago: fully open, without any walls or without any protective barriers. So it is so good to see something back to normalcy.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that everything is the same for hospital workers, Bharucha said.
In the intensive care units, he said, “there is a lot of mental trauma from seeing so many patients not do well and pass away, so we have had some nurses who have left the ICU permanently. And they have picked up some other jobs — for example, working from home for an insurance company or working from home reviewing cases or going to post-operative care units. ... It has taken a huge toll on them mentally, emotionally.”
Bharucha said the drop in cases may be related to expanding vaccinations among children who often showed no signs of the respiratory illness but were “silent carriers” of the disease in their families.
Unvaccinated people more likely to be hospitalized
In a statement released Thursday, California Department of Public Health leaders said rates of both cases and hospitalizations remain highest among unvaccinated individuals and lowest among those who are boosted.
Using data from March 7 to 13, unvaccinated people were 4.2 times more likely to be hospitalized than boosted individuals, and currently, 82.3% of the state population ages 5 and up have been vaccinated at least once, according to the health department.
Drugstores and many health care providers around the region have now begun offering second booster shots of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to eligible individuals ages 50 or older and to certain immunocompromised individuals ages 12 and older.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "For first time in 2 years, some Sacramento-area ICUs go days without a COVID-19 patient."
