A quarterly report from Central Peninsula Hospital was presented to the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly at their Tuesday evening meeting.
Hospital CEO Rick Davis provided the presentation with a finance report, a COVID-19 status report and service improvements. In providing a COVID-19 update, Davis says, “We continue to operate under the emergency operations framework, the Borough also still has their instinct command structure stood up. We have vaccinated about 415 of our own employees, only 20 of those have not gotten a second shot yet, so basically 395 have had both vaccines. We’re getting ready to offer the vaccine to the next phase of people, which is 50 and older who have direct patient contact. Our family practice clinics and our internal medicine clinics have vaccinated 740 of their patients. We’ve been doing about 24 patients a day that meet the criteria, which has been over 65 up until the new tier was announced. So, it’s mostly the over 65 people that are in that 740 and then we’ve done three weekend clinics on Saturday and we’ve done approximately 200 patients at each clinic those three Saturdays.”
Davis says the hospital’s COVID-19 numbers are trending downward, “The actual COVID epidemic, we’ve been running zero or one COVID positive patient in the hospital for probably the last couple of weeks. We’ve actually had several days where we had none or one, so that’s a lot different than it was back last fall. We seem to be in a pretty good place. I’m knocking on every piece of wood I walk by that that trend continues and I think, as the vaccination program continues to roll out, I’m very hopeful that we’ve seen the worst of the COVID epidemic behind us.”
Davis was asked what kind of impact Alaska’s emergency disaster declaration lapsing means for the hospital. He said, “Our expanded bed capacity goes away. Under the emergency declaration, we’re able to go beyond our licensed bed capacity, we’re licensed for 49 beds and we had a census of 62 for awhile. With the disaster declaration gone, we would be in violation of our license if we were to do that, so we basically have to shut that expansion unit down, which we’re not using now. However, there’s a little ambiguity on how the vaccination distribution will go without the disaster declaration, but there’s different impacts to each individual community and they’re not really clear yet because there are some advisories or recommendations that the state is going to maintain. It’s more of a concern about what might happen if we do have a flare up in the COVID situation.”