Santa Barbara County remains an outlier in the Southern California Region, having 32.9 new COVID cases per 100,000 residents — the rest of the region, with the exception of San Luis Obispo’s 38, ranges between 67 (Orange) and 149 (San Bernardino). Nonetheless, the county has more patients in the hospital than ever — 102 patients, 21 of them in an intensive care unit.
With infections skyrocketing, chances seem slim to nonexistent that the state will allow Santa Barbara to create a new region with Ventura and San Luis Obispo any time soon. Last Friday, Supervisor Gregg Hart spoke with Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s health secretary, about the request. Ghaly indicated they were projecting hospital capacity to January 25 in order to determine if the shutdown should continue. Santa Barbara’s fate appears tied in with that calculation.
The overall intensive-care-unit availability in California is 1.4 percent, affecting all the state’s regions but the most rural, Hart said. Santa Barbara’s ICU availability is above 30 percent, said Dr. Henning Ansorg, the county’s health officer, adding “a glimmer of hope” in the form of the two new vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna that are coming in “regular shipments now.”