Escambia County reports daily the number of hospital beds and ventilators available. The county doesn’t report Intensive Care Unit (ICU) statistics.
But the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration does.
As of noon today:
| Adult ICU | Available | Available | |
| Census | ICU Beds | % | |
| Ascension | 32 | 8 | 20.00% |
| Baptist | 35 | 1 | 2.78% |
| West Florida | 33 | 3 | 8.33% |
| Select Speciality | 6 | 0 | 0.00% |
| Total | 106 | 12 | 10.17% |
Why does Escambia County hide this information from the public? Â The county has full-time staff with access to all this data. Â County administration says it stays “in daily contact with health officials at the Florida Department of Health and local hospitals.”
BTW: Total hospital bed availability for Escambia for today is 25%.
Pat you are spot on that positive covid tests, period, would be the most reliable count. A lot of people are still very grateful to Rick for trying to get at any information whatever that can be gotten.
With unreliable testing data coming from the DOH, and DeSantis’s administration expressly directing that hospitals no longer break out covid counts in ICU, do you think there’s much chance that they would request the one data point that would actually give the public a clear picture?
Even if DeSantis requested that, would our hospitals make it public?
And with precious little information coming out from either the DOH or the hospitals themselves, how should we try to gauge where our hospitals are at currently?
Those are honest questions. The fact that it is like pulling teeth to get *any* concrete data indicates that something is awry.
Available ICU beds is unrelated to covid or otherwise. Hospitals are designed to be financially viable at or near full capacity. I work at an area hospital, prior to covid, our hospital was at 100% capacity and we typically had overflows in the ER waiting for rooms. Now the hospital is never at full capacity and has taken a financial hit because of this. A typical healthy hospital has few to no available beds, this isn’t due to covid.
It’s misleading to talk about how few ICU beds or otherwise are available. I personally would like to see a count of covid positive patients in area hospitals (not patients with covid symptoms) and use this as a gauge for the current effects in our area.
It seems important to keep front and center the following context:
–On June 23rd, the news broke that Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Scott Rivkees, had ordered hospitals to stop breaking covid patient counts out in their ICU counts.
–The same day, it was reported that DeSantis’s Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Mary Mayhew had made a state-wide phone call to hospitals asking them to change their reporting of ICU beds from traditional reporting to how many patients requiring intensive level care could be crammed in to overflow areas of the hospital if necessary.
And then we wonder why it’s so difficult to track what’s really going on in our ICUs. It’s quite simple, really. They don’t want us to know.
In addition, ICU counts, which have already been rendered useless for any solid idea of covid levels in hospitals, wouldn’t provide the complete current scenario even if this data manipulation weren’t happening. As healthcare providers find new ways to battle the virus, a greater number of covid patients can be treated with drugs and other therapies that do not require intensive-level treatment.
If there hasn’t been a serious increase in pressure on hospitals due to covid, why aren’t hospital administrators publicly addressing recent changes to visitation?
I understand that Rick, but my question is how does this compare to the same time last year. I understand that the current capacity is low, but I don’t think having 30 empty ICU beds in a hospital is fiscally achievable.
A filled ICU bed is one unavailable for anyone – COVID patient or not.
My question is what percentage of the patients in ICU are COVID-19 related? I can’t seem to find that information anywhere. This leaves me wondering what percentage were occupied at the same time last year.
https://bi.ahca.myflorida.com/t/ABICC/views/Public/ICUBedsHospital?%3AshowAppBanner=false&%3Adisplay_count=n&%3AshowVizHome=n&%3Aorigin=viz_share_link&%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y&%3Aembed=y&fbclid=IwAR22H5ZiIeFTH8qkZ1DNgfQ9tgkPuw5-51o73esp09ZHKoXZhd5AV7GZT5I
Could you give us the link to find this information? The website doesn’t have much in the way of searching.
This number changes daily rapidly, sometime hourly. Constant moving in and out. Downgrades/upgraded etc.
Critical care needs changes in minutes.