As COVID-19 cases continue to increase throughout the bay area, some of the largest climbs are in southern Santa Clara County.
Gilroy’s only hospital is struggling to keep up with demand and on Monday community leaders sounded the alarm and tried to explain the rise, while urging people to redouble their efforts to prevent the propagation.
At Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy, the ICU was full and, on average, they had to transfer one to two patients a day to other hospitals.
“We started canceling elective surgeries so that the nurses in our surgery department would be deployed to help the ICU, the emergency department and the medical center,” Gloria dela Merced said.
But it’s not enough, with the full ICU, transfers to other hospitals have become a daily occurrence, sometimes even requiring a transfer to another county. While some subacute patients are being transferred to De Paul Health Center in Morgan Hill.
“It’s really helping to discharge those patients who are stable enough to be discharged but who don’t come home,” Merced said.
Gilroy and Morgan Hill have more cases than almost anywhere else in the county, which is why the beds fill up so quickly. But why?
“We know that there are several factors involved in the high number of cases: one is the density of the number of people in the population living in a small space and the other is theirs and the percentage of the population that performs essential work, ”Said Maribel Martinez, Santa Clara County Public Information Officer.
And while only a quarter of the nation’s population is Latino, they account for nearly 52 percent of all county covide cases.
That’s why on Monday, community health leaders sounded the alarm in Spanish and English, urging people in the region to stay home on New Year’s Eve and wear masks.