Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have remained low in the county, sparing the region's health system.
They’ve built special wards, literally punching holes in their walls and snaking ventilation pipes through their halls to make their rooms ready to receive COVID-19 patients.
They’ve conserved personal protective equipment, and they’ve canceled most elective procedures, inconveniencing their own patients in ways that will surely take months to untangle.
But, as Easter arrived, the expected surge of patients with novel coronavirus infections still has not swamped local emergency rooms and intensive care units across San Diego County though news came this weekend that many hospitals in Baja California now have more patients than they can handle.
As of Saturday afternoon, the county public health department has tallied just 396 total hospitalizations since Feb. 14, nowhere near the number that would be needed to inundate the combined capacity of the region’s 21 acute care hospitals which, taken together, exceeds 7,000 beds.
But that does not mean that the burden has fallen evenly on San Diego’s houses of healing. Hospitals in Escondido, San Diego and Chula Vista, visited Friday, had similar but distinct COVID experiences.