KCBX s Angel Russell reports.
More than a month since the state s reopening, health officials say they are beginning to notice cases of COVID-19 rising, with an uptick in patients returning to hospitals seeking care from the virus.
While the surge of COVID-19 cases throughout the nation is overwhelming some hospitals, on the Central Coast, patient numbers are still relatively low but increasing.
Robert Cook, Chief Nursing Officer for Twin Cities Community Hospital, said the Delta variant of the virus is partially fueling the upswing.
“We’ve seen a small uptick over the last two weeks, Cook said. Nothing like they are seeing across the nation, but we are seeing patches of patients come through with COVID.”
California aligns mask guidelines with CDC
and last updated 2021-05-07 01:46:18-04
Mask wearing is slowly becoming a thing of the past for people fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
The CDC and the State of California have recently updated their guidelines in the past week, allowing those inoculated to go without a mask in public more often.
If you are vaccinated, you are not required to wear a face mask at small gatherings both indoors and outdoors, but state health experts say unvaccinated people should.
âWhat [the updated guidelines] really do though is to encourage people to get fully vaccinated because only when everybody has been fully vaccinated can we dispense of masks altogether,â said Dr. Chuck Merrill, Chief Medical Officer at Marian Regional Medical Center.
PATRICIA MARTELLOTTI I KEYT
While she knows her routine around the er like the back of her hand,
Gonzalez said facing the COVID-19 pandemic was a different story.
“I think the craziest thing for us this year honestly has been how much was unknown. at the beginning we didn’t know if we were going to have a huge influx of patients or was it going to be very slow. we didn’t know even how the disease was contagious or not,” said Gonzalez.
Gonzalez along with all healthcare professionals at Marian Regional Medical Center said another challenge about the pandemic was its unpredictability. “Some days there was nothing to do when everybody was in lock down. and then on other days we never sat down. then we would go from very sick patient to very sick patient, and that was really exhausting for people.”