BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — Even with a decrease in COVID-19 cases, public health said there could be another surge.
“On September 13th, Kern county’s COVID-19 hospitalizations peaked with 336 hospitalizations,” said Brynn Carrigan, Director, Kern County Public Health.
It’s about two months since Kern County hit the peak of hospitalizations.
According to the most recent data from the state as of Tuesday California has a little more than 4,000 patients hospitalized with covid-19 and Kern County currently has about 242 patients in the hospital.
Comparing that to other counties across the state Kern has the 6th highest number of hospitalized patients. That’s after Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Fresno, San Diego, and Riverside counties.
Kern County accounts for about 6 percent of the total hospitalizations across the state and only 2 percent of the total population.
Even though Kern County hospitalizations are trending down, Carrigan said Kern is not out of the woods yet and that’s according to new modeling projections from the state.
“Specifically, the worst-case scenario indicates that our secondary peak will occur on February 13th, with 1,031 hospitalizations, which is 700 more hospitalizations than we saw at the peak of the third surge. The moderate case scenario reflects a plateau with 120 hospitalizations holding steady during late March and early April 2022. The best-case scenario reflects a steady continued decrease in hospitalizations,” said Carrigan.
Looking at ICU numbers the latest data shows Kern County has about 56 patients in the ICU. Which is lower than it was during the peak.
“Our covid related ICUs peaked on October 3rd with 80 ICU patients,” said Carrigan.
Data shows that Kern has 18 available ICU beds, the state has about 18,000 beds in the ICU
And with the modeling, public health is not very optimistic that kern is in the clear yet. So, it’s important to stay healthy and vigilant.
“It’s difficult to know exactly which scenario we will trend with, but we do know that our vaccination and booster dose rates are relatively low which would suggest based on the definition that we’ll likely track along the worst-case scenario,” said Carrigan.
