Kaiser hospitals in Solano nearly out of ICU beds
The Vacaville campus has just 1 ICU bed available; the Vallejo campus has 2.
(Graphic by Solano News Update)
Two hospitals in Solano County are dangerously close to running out of hospital intensive care unit (ICU) beds, including the county’s main trauma center in Vacaville, according to a review of state data by Solano News Update.
The reduced capacity of hospital ICU bed space is of particular concern as the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus COVID-19 continues to climb locally.
In Vacaville, the Kaiser Permanente hospital has 16 hospital ICU beds overall, but just one of those beds was free as of Wednesday, the state’s data revealed. That hospital serves as the main trauma center for Solano County.
The Kaiser Permanente hospital in Vallejo is also running short of ICU beds, with just 2 of the hospital’s 24 ICU beds available as of Wednesday.
In total, 17 ICU beds are available across five Solano County hospitals, the state’s data revealed. Solano hospitals have admitted a total of 74 individuals with COVID-19 and are treating 18 of those patients in their ICUs, the data showed.
The hospitalization data shows a sharp increase in cases treated at Solano County hospitals when compared to data from the first week of November. Then, less than 30 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 and fewer than 10 were hospitalized in ICUs.
In an e-mail sent to Solano News Update, a spokesperson for Kaiser Permanente disputed the state’s health data, asserting their hospital ICU capacity was greater than what the state was reporting.
Nonetheless, the data is also concerning because state health officials are now using hospital ICU capacity to determine if tougher COVID-19 restrictions should be placed on residents and businesses. Earlier this month, state officials issued a new stay-at-home order after the number of positive COVID-19 cases in November spiked with no sign of slowing down.
State officials divided California into five “regions,” with Solano County placed in the Bay Area region alongside nearly a dozen neighboring counties. As of Wednesday evening, the Bay Area region had not met the state’s threshold for imposing new restrictions under the stay-at-home order, which kicks in when a region’s available ICU bed space dips below 15 percent.
But the Bay Area region is getting closer to the trigger: Over the weekend, the percentage of available ICU beds was around 25 percent. That number dropped to just over 20 percent on Wednesday and is expected to go lower in the coming days.
The Bay Area region’s average ICU capacity is being weighed down by a spike in infections and hospitalizations in Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties, an analysis of state health data by Solano News Update revealed. Those three counties and two others — Santa Clara and Marin — decided last week to voluntarily impose the tougher stay-at-home restrictions before the state’s threshold was triggered, saying it was necessary to “pull the emergency brake” earlier in an effort to curb COVID-19 infections.
Solano County has taken the opposite approach, choosing not to impose the tougher restrictions until they’re forced to. Doing so earlier, officials said, would prove detrimental to businesses, which they claimed were not the cause of the county’s spike in positive COVID-19 cases. (County officials provided no direct evidence to support that claim.)
[Editor’s note: This story was updated Friday morning to include a comment from a Kaiser Permanente spokesperson.]
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