California is bracing itself for a post-holidays surge upon a surge upon a surge of COVID-19 cases, when hospital capacity is already extremely low around the state.
Last week, KQED's Brian Watt spoke with Kaiser Permanente infectious disease specialist Dr. Michael Vollmer about how Kaiser is handling the overflow of cases. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What could all these new cases mean for hospitals that are already feeling strained?
Michael Vollmer: What we're dealing with is our third surge in Northern California community cases, and that ends up coming into our emergency rooms in hospitals. So we're seeing numbers that are double what we saw at the peak in July. And these patients are sick. They often require intensive care. They have prolonged hospital stays. If we see peaks after these holiday periods, people will remain in the hospital for a longer period of time, which affects our capacity to handle additional cases.
Where does a hospital put all of these extra patients?
Kaiser Permanente is lucky in that we're an integrated system. We also had emergency preparedness and a pandemic plan that's been in place for months. That said, we still have to flex. We have the ability to handle at least 30% to 40% more patients than our average, but that means that we've had to curb some of our elective surgeries and redirect resources where we can.
But I can tell you that our people are just tired. They have been doing this now for nine, 10 months. It puts a strain on the health care system that we would all really like to avoid. And hence our message to the public, to really try to follow the directions that we've laid out, the masking, the distancing, hand-washing. They really do work. And they've done a great job in the past at curbing the community spread the two prior times of surge.
Who is showing up to Kaiser at this time?
Most people [who have been infected] probably have symptoms they maybe think are mild allergies, sniffles, cold, which they may not even get tested for. And 40% of people are asymptomatic, is the high estimate. But when people come into the hospital, they're sick. And the people who are really most at risk are over 65; they're at very high risk of decline and even death. So it's really about trying to curb the spread to protect the most vulnerable of our population.
Do you feel like the stay-at-home order has been effective in Northern California?
I think it's needed, and that people need to understand that their personal choices do affect our ability to operate services and businesses. The pandemic has been detrimental, for example, to our school system. Normal operations of what we call society are dependent on our ability to curb the pandemic. If we want to keep our services available to people, we have to take these kinds of measures very quickly.
What does the arrival of the vaccine look like at the facilities you serve?
It's been a light at the end of the tunnel. We have over 20,000 health care employees vaccinated through Kaiser. We're trying to get it rapidly through our system so we can make it more widely available to our members.
