Dignity Health seeing drop in COVID hospitalizations

Kern County Public Health released new COVID case numbers on Wednesday, reporting 134 new cases, bringing the total number of local cases to 103,756.

Public Health also reported that 13 more people have lost their lives to the coronavirus, increasing the total number of deaths to 915.

The recent case numbers come as new data on hospitalizations is also being released.

Dignity Health Officials addressed all the new data, saying they're continuing to see a drop in COVID hospitalizations.

Dignity Health, which oversees Mercy Downtown, Mercy southwest, and Memorial Hospitals, held their weekly roundtable this Wednesday morning.

Ken Keller, who is the president and CEO of Memorial Hospital, said his hospital is currently seeing about a third of the patients that they saw in January. He said they've only seen about 30 patients in the last week and ICUs have no more than 8 patients. He also said that now is the time to take a breath and examine how things work to see if there's anything that needs improvement in the event of a third surge in COVID cases.

"While that's happening, one of the things we do on the backend is reassessed how we did, what we did, what learning takeaways do we have as a result of the second wave that will better prepare us for a third wave, should it come."

Keller went on to say that Dignity's new main focus in the fight against COVID is getting people vaccinated.

Meanwhile, the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living says COVID cases at nursing homes fell 82% since December of last year.

That's the lowest since the government started tracking weekly cases in these facilities.

This comes after the beginning of the pandemic when nursing homes were a hotbed for the coronavirus.