Coronavirus numbers are starting to go up in the region with Thursday marking the 7th consecutive day daily COVID-19 numbers are in the 200s and the 29th consecutive day the state has seen more than 100 new cases per day.
Bruce Richards, Director of External Affairs for Central Peninsula Hospital provides an update on hospital COVID-19 inpatients, “As cases start to spike, as we’ve seen recently, testing generally starts to ramp up as well. We’re doing more testing, we’re not the only place that does testing. We are definitely seeing more COVID positive cases through our testing and, in addition to that, we are seeing more COVID positive patients admitted to the hospital. I want to be really clear about that specific piece. People come into the hospital that are COVID positive and that doesn’t mean they are here because of COVID. It means they might have something else and have COVID. We have five patients this morning that are COVID positive. Yesterday we had three. This is the largest number of COVID positive patients we have had in the hospital at one time. These are the highest numbers we’ve had on the Peninsula since this started.”
According to daily public health numbers, the Central Peninsula is currently seeing 107 cases of COVID-19 over a 14-day period. The Central Peninsula is seeing a 7.64 average daily case incidence.
Richards talked about capacity at the hospital how the hospital is preparing if the numbers continue to go up, “We’re prepared to take care of COVID patients. We have the proper personal protective equipment here. We have the space. We have the ability to expand within the hospital. We have gone through that drill starting in March when this happened. We have the ability to in-fact double the capacity of the entire hospital. It wouldn’t be the same as it is right now, where everybody has their own private room. But we have the capacity to double that amount of beds. So, capacity-wise, we’re comfortable that we have that.”
Richards talked on if the hospital dealt with an equipment shortage, “Earlier on it was difficult getting certain pieces of personal protective equipment. In the beginning there was a rush on everything. We were able to, over time, start to get those numbers up in supplies. Right now, things are fairly good. We are probably going to have a little bit of a problem with testing if it continues to really ramp up. We do some in house testing for all of our inpatients. When you come in we have a machine that does that test and you get the result here. But we can’t get cartridges for it. They are just not available. That is still something in the supply chain that’s really broken.”
Richards advises residents of the Peninsula, to help slow the spread, by following CDC guidelines. That includes practicing social distancing, wearing a face covering and washing hands.
