Coronavirus hospitalizations may rise after July 4th, Beaufort Co. hospital CEO warns
As the Fourth of July weekend approaches, the top executive at Beaufort Memorial Hospital has a simple message: Wash your hands, wear a mask and be more cautious as COVID-19 cases spike.
“What everyone — young, old, middle-aged — should be concerned about is just the rising in the percent positive,” said hospital CEO Russell Baxley in an interview Wednesday. “Community spread, as we’ve been saying, is more prevalent than we thought.”
Baxley issued his warning a day after the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control advised South Carolina residents to stay home for the holiday.
And it came a few hours before state epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell said she was particularly worried about July 4th.
“We could see case levels that none of us could have previously imagined,” she said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon, referencing a past spike observed soon after the Memorial Day weekend. “This is a public health crisis.”
As of Wednesday, Beaufort Memorial Hospital had 12 COVID-19-positive inpatients, Baxley said. Fourteen other people were under investigation for possible coronavirus infections.
In early June, the CEO said coronavirus-positive inpatients remained steady at about three to four people.
The Hilton Head Regional Healthcare system was treating four COVID-19-positive patients as of Monday morning, according to a Tenet Healthcare spokesperson. Tenet owns Hilton Head Hospital and Coastal Carolina Hospital.
Baxley warned that, based on what happened in March, if the number of cases keeps surging — and the positive rate of new infections remains high — local hospitalizations could climb over the next two weeks.
“I point to trends in Texas and Arizona, and Florida, where their hospitals are reaching capacity, and they opened up quickly and weren’t social distancing,” he said. “We’re not as cautious as we should be, especially in the younger age groups.”
Beaufort County on Wednesday logged its highest seven-day average of diagnosed coronavirus cases since the pandemic began. The county also posted a record-breaking single-day high of 70 new COVID-19 cases Tuesday.
Since the coronavirus first reached South Carolina, Beaufort County has recorded 1,278 total cases of the potentially deadly pathogen, according to DHEC data.
A Beaufort Memorial spokesperson in a statement wrote that the positivity rate for COVID-19 tests administered at the medical center sat at about 15% to 16% as of Monday. That’s an increase from the 10% the hospital had recorded “throughout most of the pandemic,” she wrote.
Earlier this week, 19.1% of viral tests came back positive state-wide, according to DHEC data released Wednesday.
Baxley told The Island Packet that he’s closely monitoring the hospital’s 28-bed fifth floor, where COVID-19-confirmed inpatients are admitted. People who are under investigation for the virus are also placed there.
If that floor reaches capacity — and confirmed or possible cases start to spill over into other areas of the hospital — or if the ICU unit fills up, Baxley said that’s when the hospital would consider measures like canceling elective surgeries again.
“Those are the kind of things that we’re trying to avoid here,” he said.
In a letter last week, Baxley told Beaufort Mayor Billy Keyserling that “universal masking” is the only way to prevent a surge of infections from overwhelming the hospital.
Since then, Beaufort County leaders have passed a series of local laws requiring that masks be worn in some public places.
“I don’t have a crystal ball, and I hope that I’m wrong, but my expectation is that if this continues, it’s highly likely that the trend will be that hospitalizations will increase,” the CEO said Wednesday.
This story was originally published July 2, 2020 at 2:03 PM.
