The day Kern County reported its highest number of coronavirus cases, the Board of Supervisors expanded several measures designed to manage a prolonged increase in COVID-19 disease.
Kern County is once again the landmark of the coronavirus. Public health services director Matt Constantine said Tuesday during a meeting of supervisors that new cases have been identified at many of Kern’s specialized nursing facilities and in prisons, both vulnerable to the rapid spread of the virus.
Of the 2,082 cases reported Tuesday, about 800 came from prisons or from the county’s 19 nursing homes.
However, Kern County has low performance on all coronavirus metrics, with significantly higher spread rates than those reported a few weeks ago.
The county reports 16.9% positivity rate testing, more than double the level required for the state to determine that the coronavirus will be “widespread” within a region. For every 100,000 residents in Kern County, as of Tuesday, 66.3 new cases of COVID are being identified every day.
“It simply came to our notice then. They are clearly very tall. We have a factor of five or six where we want to be when we were at the red level, ”Constantine told supervisors on Tuesday, referring to the state’s four-tier system that allows for different levels of social and business activity depending on the coronavirus metric districts .
The hospital capacity of the county has also shown signs of tension. As of Tuesday, 284 patients in Kern County were hospitalized with COVID-19, with 61 in intensive care units. The county has only 4.8% capacity in its ICUs, with 20 beds available.
However, Constantí assured the council that the room for maneuver remained within the system and that the hospitals adequately managed the influx of patients with COVID-19.
“That’s what hospitals are good at,” he said, noting recently that a health executive commented that the level of activity seen at local hospitals would not be unusual in a normal flu season. “They manage daily crises every day. They have major traffic accidents. They have several family members who get sick. They are good at this. They are very good at finding out the best way to serve the public. “
However, supervisors approved two precautionary measures that extend contracts for uplift capacity efforts. To one extent, supervisors modified a lease with the Kern County Fairgrounds that allows the county to use a portion of the property for an emergency emergency expansion site if they were all occupied. local hospital beds. The lease has already been extended twice and is scheduled to end in June. The new amendment increases the cost by $ 480,000, for a total of $ 1.4 million that will come from the federal coronavirus Aid, Relief and Safety Act (CARES).
In another motion, supervisors extended another lease with the fair, 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 about $ 1 million.
“Believe it or not, this deal will have lasted a whole year,” Jim Zervis, Kern’s chief operating officer, said during the meeting. “It really shows the duration of the pandemic we just dealt with.”
Also as part of their series of motions, supervisors extended a contract with RightSourcing Inc. which was scheduled to end in late December and end now on March 31st. The contract provides for 88 nursing staff at Kern County Hospitals in the event of a shortage.
Constantine said some hospitals have begun attracting additional nurses.
“We recognized early on in the county that staffing was probably our area we needed to focus more on, and specifically ICU nurses were the area of weakness,” he said. “Therefore, we have continued to make this our top priority.”
You can reach Sam Morgen at 661-395-7415. You can also follow him on Twitter @smorgenTBC.