The Board of Trustees approved a lease to turn the former Sears building into a facility to treat COVID-19 patients, but Santa Barbara County never implemented the agreement.
During the July peak in local cases and hospital admissions, the county saw the vacant store as a potential alternative care location for South Coast patients.
The lease, which the Board of Trustees approved but never executed, outlined a plan to upgrade the building to a 200-bed medical facility to serve patients should the nationwide hospital system be overwhelmed.
The building in La Cumbre Plaza, at 3845 State St., has been vacant since Sears closed in January 2019.
“Regarding the Sears as an alternative health site, that’s not the direction of the state at the moment,” Health Director Van Do-Reynoso told regulators Tuesday.
“We currently have peak capacity in our hospitals. If we need to have an alternative care location, we work together and use what is available at SLO’s alternative care location as needed, which is a huge ‘if needed’.
“Right now, our hospitals are quite comfortable and they prefer any expansion to provide patient care within their four walls and within their campus. The problem is getting staff.”
Patients in North County can be sent to the alternative care location established (but never used) at Cal Poly, the San Luis Obispo campus.
“When we pursued the Sears as an option last year, it was a different time and a different space in the pandemic. It is no longer recommended or preferred by our local health care providers or the state, given what we know for the treatment of hospitalized patients, ”said Do-Reynoso.
The board of regulators approved the lease for the property in July, but the county later decided not to enforce the agreement, General Services Assistant Director Skip Gray told Noozhawk in an email Tuesday.
“Once it was determined that the county no longer needed the ownership of Sears, we did not enforce the agreement or lease,” said Gray.
The agreement and letter of intent to lease the property included a “no-charge holding period” through August, he said.
“The county made a decision on August 28 not to enter into the lease,” said Gray.
The county still has an agreement to use the Best Western hotel at 2220 Bath St. as an alternative care location near Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, but that hasn’t been activated, Gray said.
Plans for hospital peaks
Do-Reynoso said hospitals prefer to expand capacity within their own facilities, which they do with peak schedules.
Hospitals report currently using 13 beds in the intensive care unit for COVID-19 patients. About 64% of ICU patients in the province have COVID-19.
With 211 COVID-19 hospital patients, there are now more than twice as many compared to the peak in the summer that worried officials so much that they started looking for alternative care locations.
Cottage Health President and CEO Ron Werft last week described the work Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital has done to convert units into COVID-19 treatment rooms and to bring staff from other areas of the hospital.
There was one COVID-19 isolation unit operating at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital over Thanksgiving, and now there are five, including two ICU units, Werft said last week.
One of the surgical ICU units was being converted into a unit for the care of COVID-19 patients, he added.
The current challenge is to staff more than physical beds, public health and hospital officials say.
“Looking at the rising demand for our Santa Barbara hospitals, beds won’t be the challenge, PPE and fans won’t be the challenge,” said Werft. “The problem is the intensive care staff.
“While we currently have more staff than we would normally see, it is the ability to meet, identify, recruit and expand that kind of demand.”
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