Manatee County hospitals running out of ICU beds as COVID-19 cases surge
As cases of coronavirus continue to surge at record levels in Florida, hospitals in Manatee County are nearly out of ICU beds. Overall bed availability is also dwindling.
As of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, there were four available intensive-care unit beds between Manatee Memorial Hospital, Blake Medical Center and Lakewood Ranch Medical Center, according to the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration. The three hospitals combined had 108 beds total available.
Those available ICU beds are at Manatee Memorial and Blake, each with two.
Nine days ago, the same three hospitals had 32 available ICU beds and 336 available beds overall. At the time, Manatee County had 2,810 cases of people testing positive for the coronavirus.
As of Wednesday, local cases have increased by almost 70 percent, with 4,080 positive cases of coronavirus now reported since the onset of the pandemic.
The state has refused to release current hospitalization data for COVID-19 cases, even as new cases are surging. In Manatee County, local health department and county officials don’t have this data, either.
Manatee County, unlike other counties around state, does not have a public hospital that is required to answer to local officials.
It has only been in the past two weeks that county officials have begun including the ACHA hospital and ICU census data as a reference point in their daily internal report on COVID-19 in light of the data specific to COVID not being provided to them. One reason for this reluctance is because the ICU bed census data can be misleading.
Hospitals across the state, including in Manatee County, have created new units just to house COVID-19 patients, which may not be reflected in the ICU data.
The state told reporters at the Miami Herald it would begin releasing current hospitalization data for COVID-19 cases last week, but has so far failed to deliver. When questioned by a Miami Herald reporter and later a CNN reporter at a press conference Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis would not answer whether the state was planning to release the data.
Instead, he claimed that the daily reports issued by the Florida Department of Health had plenty of raw data. The hospitalization data in those reports, however, is cumulative and does not give the community or local officials an accurate picture of the current situations in hospitals.
As hospitals continue to be hit by the current surge, however, Manatee Memorial Hospital and Lakewood Ranch Medical Center announced Wednesday afternoon that they would no longer allow any visitation to in-patient units of their hospitals.
Surge affecting availability of ambulances
Ambulances are also being affected by the surge of patients at local hospitals, having to wait longer to transfer the care of a patient over to a hospital. As a result, these ambulances are not available to take other calls, causing gaps of coverage in the community.
The current benchmark is to transfer the care of a patient within 15 minutes of arriving at any receiving facility, said Manatee County EMS Chief James Crutchfield.
“It’s important to remember that when the ambulances are at a hospital waiting to off load patients they are not available to receive additional assignments or 911 calls, creating areas of the county that are not covered for 911 calls,” Crutchfield told the Bradenton Herald.
Ambulances have begun to go into what is also called a surge, when fewer than five ambulances are available to cover all 893 square miles of Manatee County, he added.
On Tuesday, the turnaround time exceeded 20 minutes eight times at Manatee Memorial Hospital, three times at Lakewood Ranch Medical Center and three times Blake Medical Center.
Most of the transfers that exceeded 20 minutes in the past week occurred at Manatee Memorial or Blake.
This story was originally published July 8, 2020 at 3:55 PM.
