The number of people hospitalized in the St. Louis region’s four largest healthcare systems is currently 654, which is down from 685 on Thursday, April 30.
“These are positive numbers,” said Dr. Alex Garza, chief medical office of SSM Health. “We know that they fluctuate daily, and we’re really going to be looking at the trends, more so than those daily numbers. But we’ll take those wins when we get them.”
Garza is the incident commander for the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force. The task force includes four major health care systems: BJC HealthCare, Mercy, SSM Health and St Luke’s Hospital.
Every day, Garza gives a briefing on the task force’s COVID-19 statistics that represent 2.8 million people for an area that encompasses surrounding counties in Missouri and Illinois in the larger St. Louis region.
On Friday, May 1, the number of patients in the intensive care units and number of patients on ventilators remained about the same — 164 and 112 respectively. Across the system hospitals, 60 COVID-19 patients were discharged yesterday, bringing the cumulative number of patients discharged to 1,320.
Garza said that the number of hospitalizations has started to flatten, but we have not yet seen a decline — which will be necessary to lift stay-at-home orders.
Some Republican St. Louis County Council members have chosen to disregard the medical expertise of the task force and push for St. Louis County to begin to lift stay-at-home orders on Monday. Garza has repeatedly said that the county executive and City of St. Louis mayor are “absolutely right” in extending the stay-at-home orders because of the still high number of hospitalizations in the St. Louis region.
In response to a question about the Republican council members’ push, Garza said, “As I’ve said before, if we move too fast with too much, we can cause that rebound. So we are just trying to be safe for the entire community, as well as not overwhelm our healthcare systems.”
Dr. Garza gives daily briefings on the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force Facebook page at 3:30 p.m.
