COVID-19 Surge at St. Cloud Hospital Has Plateaued

COVID-19 positive patients at CentraCare and within St. Cloud Hospital has remained steady for the past 4 to 5 weeks. CentraCare spokesman Dr. George Morris joined me on WJON today. He says they have approximately 60 people again this week with COVID-19 at the hospital with 19 in the ICU/Critical Care Unit. Morris says 18 of those people are on ventilators. Last week Morris said CentraCare had 60 hospitalized COVID-19 patients with 14 in the ICU/Critical Care Unit. 50 of the 60 hospitalized this week are at St. Cloud Hospital with the other 10 at regional CentraCare facilities.

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Morris says people can be admitted to the hospital with something that isn't COVID-19 related like a broken arm or heart attack but if they test positive for COVID-19 they will be counted among the COVID-19 positives. He says that affects how they treat that person. Morris says there is no advantage for them to have a higher number of COVID-19 patients. He says there were points this summer where they had less than 10 COVID-19 patients and says that was great and manageable. For a few hours they had 0.

CentraCare this week has reduced the amount of healthy visitors per patient to 1 person at a time. This policy has been triggered by the high COVID-19 numbers locally.

Dr. Morris says people that have had COVID-19 and recovered have a level of immunity but he says it's unclear if that immunity is better than a COVID-19 vaccine. He says having COVID and recovering along with receiving a vaccine has proven to give people the best immunity from COVID at this point based on the data they have.

If people would like to get a vaccine CentraCare still has those available by going to CentraCare's website or call 320-200-3200.

If you'd like to listen my conversation with Dr. Morris parts 1 and 2 are available below.

Segment 1