With county COVID numbers moving decidedly in the wrong direction, county supervisors got a sobering earful from their own public health authorities and medical doctors from Cottage and Marian hospitals this Tuesday, August 17.
When it comes to the number of hospital and intensive-care beds now available for patients with COVID, County Public Health czar Van Do-Reynoso said Santa Barbara County “is in the cusp of the red zone.” Translated, that means 64.5 percent of all hospital beds and 76.6 percent of all intensive-care beds are now in use.
The good news is that COVID cases in Santa Barbara County — particularly those propelled by the more contagious Delta variant — are not going up quite as fast as they had before the county declared its mask mandate for indoor use two weeks ago. The bad news is that they’re still going up. Either way, the numbers are startling.