Firefighters, EMTs to Help CA Hospitals with COVID Surge

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A North Bay hospital is one of the first in the state to receive help from emergency workers elsewhere as it tries to cope with the surge in COVID-19 patients.

The staff at Petaluma Valley Hospital is now being assisted by three firefighter-paramedics from Solano County and six emergency medical technicians from elsewhere in Sonoma County. They arrived this weekend and will be on duty at the hospital for at least 14 days.

The facility has 82 beds, and roughly 1/4 of its current patients have COVID, according to Steven Buck, head of communications for the northern region of Providence St. Joseph Health, which operates Petaluma Valley and two other hospitals in the North Bay. Buck said that the request for outside help was made earlier in December, as the regional surge began to gain momentum.

"It wasn't that we had a specific surge" one day last week that prompted the request, he said.

The program — which became active as of Dec. 30 — is being managed by the state's Office of Emergency Services using the same framework as when crews are sent to help cover large emergencies such as wildfires and floods. But this time the Fire and Rescue Mutual Aid System has been activated "to assist emergency rooms and other vital medical areas in some of the most impacted hospitals in California," space according to a news release Sunday from the office.

The other hospitals receiving deployments are in Irvine, Barstow (San Bernardino County) and Kern County. A spokesman for the state office could not be reached Sunday evening to say whether more deployments are scheduled in coming days.

According to Buck, when hospitals face staffing binds the standard practice is to put out a request for traveling nurses. But with a statewide surge that shows no signs of breaking, "there's so much competition for traveling nurses that they aren't available," Buck said. He also indicated that similar requests have been made by St. Joseph hospitals elsewhere in Northern California.

"At every hospital, medical staff are tired," said Buck, noting that they have spent more than nine months of doing their best to cope with a pandemic at a scale not seen in more than a century. "This (deployment) is very welcome."

As of Sunday, Sonoma County had 94 COVID patients at county hospitals and 27 intensive care beds were available, according to state health data. For the Bay Area as a whole, ICU capacity on Sunday afternoon was at 8.4 percent.

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