Santa Clara County has launched a new online dashboard that tracks the number of hospital beds and ventilators that remain available, in an effort to reassure the community about its capacity to manage a potential surge in patients.
“The reason we want to be transparent is because we want the public to be confident that we are doing everything we can to be ready,” says Deputy County Executive David Campos.
The dashboard includes information about cases as well as the number of hospital beds, ICU beds, ventilators and surge beds that are in use and still available.
“I personally think that it’s reassuring, if you’re a resident of the county, to know that on March 31st there were 936 hospital beds available in the county, that there were still 92 ICU beds available,” says Campos.
The tracker also shows that just over two-thirds of the county’s ventilators are currently available and only 5 out of 1461 surge capacity beds are in use.
And officials say they are continuously working to increase resources.
“Each hospital in our county is adding additional beds - and in many cases entire units - to help care for an increased number of hospitalized patients,” says Dr. Jennifer Tong with the county’s Emergency Operations Center.
“By sharing the data, in some ways I think it will reassure people that our hospitals currently have a significant amount of remaining capacity.”
California has also launched a tracker with information about the number of cases statewide.
The new trackers come as health experts across the county have criticized local agencies for being slow to make this type of data publicly available. Experts say up-to-date and accurate data is essential in order to understand the spread of the virus.