SLO County doctors and nurses worn out as hospitals cope with flood of COVID patients
San Luis Obispo County doctors and medical officials, beleaguered by almost 19 months of nonstop pandemic care capped by a new and sudden influx of seriously ill coronavirus patients, gathered together to offer a unified plea to the public this week:
Get vaccinated and wear a mask — we are at a breaking point.
“In all my years, I have never seen anything like the COVID-19 pandemic,” French Hospital Medical Center Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tom Vendegna said during a news conference Tuesday. “The COVID Delta surge that we are currently experiencing has caused a great influx of patients all of a sudden into our hospital — in the emergency department (and in) the medical floors in the ICU.”
Vendega said this has put a strain on nurses and physicians who have already been working around the clock for more than a year-and-a-half, since March 2020.
“They are getting tired of this,” he said. “Their efforts are amazing, but like all of you in the community, they want this pandemic to end.”
Mark Lisa, CEO of Tenet Healthcare Central Coast, put it even more bluntly.
“They are tired. They are drained. But what keeps (healthcare workers) going is a love of their patients,” he said during the same news conference. “My personal message to you all: This is real. This is the worst that we’ve seen so far.”
SLO County COVID-19 hospitalizations surging
The news conference came on the same day the San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department announced that local hospitals were treating a total of 67 county residents with severe COVID-19, including 20 in intensive care units.
That’s the highest number of COVID-19 patients San Luis Obispo County has ever had in ICUs and hospitals since the pandemic arrived here last year.
The last time anywhere close to that many San Luis Obispo County residents were hospitalized for coronavirus was on New Year’s Day, when 64 locals were in the hospital and ICU.
That was during the previous peak of coronavirus transmission in San Luis Obispo County, before vaccinations helped to get numbers under control.
Notably, that January date had far fewer people in the ICU — only 13 compared to 20 on Tuesday — indicating the latest cases of coronavirus in SLO County are much more severe.
Tuesday’s total of 20 patients in the ICU also represents the highest number of SLO County coronavirus patients in intensive care throughout the entire pandemic.
“These numbers supersede anything that we have seen in this pandemic, including in our winter surge total hospitalizations,” county Public Health Officer Dr. Penny Borenstein said during the conference Tuesday. “We don’t want to put even more stress on our hospitals as this surge may lead to completely overwhelming our healthcare system and especially our hospitals.”
During the conference, Borenstein announced a return to mandatory masking indoors as another means to help fight the spread of the latest variant.
Delta variant driving patient increase at North County hospital
So what does the latest surge look like in local hospitals?
At Twin Cities Community Hospital in Templeton, director of emergency services Dr. Cinnamon Redd said she’s noticed a definite increase in the number of coronavirus patients coming into the hospital in recent weeks.
Redd said she’s seen “a big jump” in the number of patients coming into the ER since the summer, 90 to 100 in a 24-hour period now vs. 60 at the start of summer. And many arrive with COVID-19 symptoms.
“I would say at least half of the patients I’ll see on a shift will be complaints related to COVID,” she said. “I would say we probably saw it over the last month — the volume has steadily been increasing. It’s gone hand in hand with the Delta variant coming into our community.”
The Delta variant is proving to be more highly transmissible and causes more severe symptoms than the Alpha variant, which was the predominant strain of coronavirus through the majority of the pandemic.
As of this week, about 98% of new coronavirus cases in California are due to the Delta variant, according to state public health data.
“It’s different, it’s worse,” Redd said. “The Delta variant is at least twice as infectious or contagious between people. So, where people were able to not get exposed to it before, it’s just a lot more difficult now. We’re seeing a lot of people who are coming in with minimal exposures — really, sometimes you can’t even figure out where they got it from.”
Dr. Irene Spinello, the medical director of the intensive care unit at Twin Cities, said the Delta variant is characterized by an “extremely quick deterioration.”
“You walk into the hospital,” she said. “Six hours later, you’re in the ICU. Two days later, you’re in a state when we have to start discussing where we go from here — there are very little therapeutic agents that we can use. The only thing we can do is buy time for the lungs to recover on their own. And that would have worked with the other two spikes (variants).”
Spinello said that recovery is not happening with Delta.
“Delta takes you and takes you really quick, to the point where the four-week recovery period with the other two spikes is down to four days,” she said. “And there’s no coming out.”
Notably, Redd said the virus is hitting more younger people than before — especially in the 40-to-50 year old age group — and is impacting them more severely.
“The type of person we’re seeing getting admitted to the hospital now is younger, somewhat healthier,” Redd said. “But it is a younger group because a lot of that age group hasn’t gotten vaccinated.”
Vaccine rates have lagged among San Luis Obispo County’s younger residents, with less than half of 18- to 49-year-olds fully vaccinated as of Aug. 7, according to data from the California Department of Health.
Both Redd and Spinello said the latest surge is weighing heavily on Twin Cities staff.
“I think we, the staff, is getting a little tired, you know?” Redd said. “I think everybody was hoping at this time of year to be getting back to normalcy. ... The schools are open, people are vaccinated, people have the option to get vaccinated, and I think we were hoping to go back to how it used to be. And I think there’s a little bit of disappointment right now that our numbers are just as high as they were at the worst, the peak of the COVID infections back in the winter.”
Spinello put it another way.
“We’re taking care of our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers, and that makes it emotionally even more difficult to see our friends and family in such a bad situation,” she said. “And the true heroes are the nurses, the respiratory therapists, the physical therapists, the staff that comes to work every day knowing that it’s gonna be rougher than they’ve ever worked before. And not only that, they take extra shifts. They do overtime. And they have no life. We are here day and night, taking care of our neighbors, our friends and family.”
Surge ‘came really rapidly’ to Sierra Vista hospital, directors say
At Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, Dr. Ross Michel, who heads up the hospital’s ICU, said they’ve seen “a pretty dramatic increase in admissions for COVID” in recent weeks.
Before that, numbers had been lulling throughout the summer, and workers were anticipating some return to normal.
Then, suddenly, a surge was upon them.
“This time it just kind of went from zero to 10,” said Aaron Thorne, Sierra Vista’s director of nursing for critical care. “The difference this time was the quickness that it came, because we weren’t seeing COVID patients at a hospital, and it came really rapidly.”
Michel estimated there have been between 10 and 15 patients in Sierra Vista’s coronavirus ICU in the past week (the hospital created a separate ICU at the start of the pandemic last year to treat patients with COVID-19).
That increase in patients is stressing available resources, not to mention the mental health of staff.
“This isn’t how we were used to doing business,” Thorne said, noting that helping the families of those in the COVID ICU, where traditional visiting isn’t allowed, has been especially difficult. “With COVID, it’s been an unusual strain on that, and it’s been, from the mental health standpoint of the staff, very difficult as well.”
“It’s really been a challenge on the critical care staff,” he added. “It’s been a real strain on them because ... it’s just, it’s hard because these patients are with us for extended periods of time and sometimes up to three months, and so often (have) poor outcomes. That’s pretty hard.”
Doctors urge vaccinations to stop spread of Delta variant
Most local doctors have one message they want San Luis Obispo County residents to hear: Get vaccinated.
“The majority of the people that are actually hospitalized with a COVID-related illness are unvaccinated,” Redd said. “We have unfortunately been seeing some people who are vaccinated getting COVID, but ... those people are not getting sick enough to need to be hospitalized. So the vaccine is doing its job. It’s keeping people out of the hospital and keeping them from getting severe disease.”
As of Tuesday, just under 77% of new coronavirus cases reported since June 15 were among the unvaccinated, according to San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department data.
Just over 85% of SLO County hospitalizations due to COVID-19 in that period were unvaccinated, along with 79% of deaths, according to the data.
Michel said the “overwhelming majority” of patients who end up in Sierra Vista’s ICU with coronavirus symptoms are unvaccinated — somewhere around 95%.
Some of those people ask for the vaccine while in the ICU, he said, though they unfortunately can’t get it once they are already showing severe symptoms.
“I have seen that a couple of patients in the ICU have said, ‘Boy, I really want to get that vaccine now, and I tell all my friends and family,’ ” he said. “We have a couple patients that have actually done that. They’ve gone to call their family members and called friends and trying to put the word out, and we definitely appreciate that. ... So a lot of them, not all of them, but you know, most of them, do kind of have that change of heart when they get that sick.”
Michel urged anyone who could to get the coronavirus vaccine to help cut off any more spread of the virus and prevent further stress on local hospitals.
“This is completely preventable, and devastating, when it happens,” he said. “Anything that people can do to prevent themselves from getting to the next level is very helpful to all of us doctors and nurses.”
Spinello had a similar plea.
“Please, please, get vaccinated,” she said. “That’s the only way to protect yourself. There are very small cases of vaccinated people who have gotten the disease, but their disease is so much lighter, and they actually spend time at home, recover and get well. The unvaccinated people are upstairs on the second floor, having a very rough time.”
%20Cropped.jpg)