BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — On Tuesday Kern County Board of Supervisors meeting Director of Public Health Bryn Carrigan discussed the latest COVID-19 numbers.
Although infections have increased the county has come up with solutions to help with the stress, COVID-19 has put on hospitals.
With COVID cases on the rise Kern County officials are doing what they can to get ahead of the predicted COVID-19 peak, this time getting the help of the national guard.
“The hospitalization modeling suggest that our COVID-19 related hospitalizations will peak later this week at 333 on September 17,” said Carrigan.
Carrigan said a little less than half (47.6%) of Kern County's population has been vaccinated.
Leaving 53.4% of the population more vulnerable to covid 19.
“Over the last 14 days 99.17% of our cases were amongst those unvaccinated,” said Carrigan.
Kerns ICU capacity is at 10% so they are in the preliminary stage of planning for the next big peak, so to help with those rising numbers, Kern County is calling on the national guard.
“We were also able to recruit 8 Kern Medical Reserve Corps volunteers to assist at our hospitals additionally a medical staff team from the national guard arrived yesterday they will be here until they determine the resource is no longer needed which is anticipated to be in the next 4-6 weeks,”
In August 23ABC spoke with Dr. Hemmal Kothary who gave us a glimpse into how quickly the delta variant spreads.
“If you imagined the original coronavirus if you imagined you would have 1 molecule of virus in your body the delta variant has a thousand. So, when we first started with this pandemic, we would say having a conversation with someone for 15 minutes is what it would take to get the virus with a large amount of virus with the delta variant it takes about probably 10 seconds,” said Kothary.
Carrigan said they are also using the county funds to place 19,500 ICU nursing staff into local hospitals and expanding 10 ICU beds and 20 regular hospital beds and believes this expansion will occur in the next week.
