On the day Kern County reported the highest number of new coronavirus cases ever, the Board of Trustees expanded several measures to control a long-term rise in COVID-19 illnesses.
Kern County once again finds itself as a coronavirus hotspot. Public Health Services Director Matt Constantine said at a supervisor meeting Tuesday that new cases have been identified in many of Kern’s skilled nursing facilities and prisons, both of which are vulnerable to rapid spread of the virus.
Of the 2,082 cases reported Tuesday, about 800 came from prisons or the county’s 19 nursing homes.
However, Kern County is performing poorly across all coronavirus statistics, with spread rates significantly higher than reported a few weeks ago.
The county reports a positivity rate of 16.9%, more than twice the level required by the state to determine that the coronavirus is “widespread” within a region. For every 100,000 residents of Kern County, 66.3 new COVID cases will be identified as of Tuesday.
‘Those numbers are alarming. They are clearly very high. We’re a factor of five or six from where we want to be when we were in the red layer, ”Constantine told supervisors on Tuesday, referring to the four-tier state system that allows for different levels of business and social activity depending on the coronavirus- statistics.
The province’s hospital capacity is also showing signs of tension. As of Tuesday, 284 Kern County patients were hospitalized with COVID-19, with 61 in intensive care units. The province has only 4.8% capacity in the ICUs, with 20 beds available.
Still, Constantine assured the board that there was room for maneuver within the system and that hospitals could adequately accommodate the influx of COVID-19 patients.
“This is what (hospitals) are good at,” he said, noting that a health director recently noted that the level of activity in local hospitals would not be unusual in a normal flu season. “They manage daily crises every day. They have major road accidents. They have a number of family members who get sick. They are good at that. They are very good at figuring out how best to serve the audience. “
Nevertheless, the regulators approved two precautions to extend contracts for peak capacity efforts. In one measure, supervisors amended a lease with the Kern County Fairgrounds, allowing the county to use part of the property for an emergency power surge extension site in the event that all local hospital beds are occupied. The lease has already been renewed twice and now expires in June. The new amendment increases costs by $ 480,000, for a new total of about $ 1.4 million that will come from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
In another motion, supervisors renewed another lease with the exchange, allowing the county to house 15 temporary isolation units on the property to house homeless people sick with COVID-19. The maximum cost of this lease is now approximately $ 1 million.
“Believe it or not, that agreement will last a full year,” Jim Zervis, Kern’s Chief Operations Officer, said at the meeting. “It really shows the duration of the pandemic we just keep going on.”
Also as part of the series of motions, supervisors renewed a contract with RightSourcing Inc. which was expected to expire at the end of December and now end on March 31. in the event that a shortage arises.
Constantine said some hospitals have begun to hire additional nurses.
“We recognized early in the province that staffing was probably our area we needed to focus on most, and ICU nurses in particular were the weak area,” he said. “So we have continued to make it our top priority.”
You can reach Sam Morgen at 661-395-7415. You can also follow him on Twitter @smorgenTBC.