A surge of younger COVID-19 patients is filling up Miami-Dade hospitals, the Miami Herald reports.
While there are still available beds, doctors say they are concerned with the spike they attribute to community spread as people return to work, according to the newspaper.
Dr. Sergio Segarra, an emergency room physician at Baptist Hospital Miami, said he is seeing fewer elderly patients and nursing home residents being hospitalized with COVID-19. He said many of the hospitalizations are not intensive care admissions.
“Community spread is the source of a lot of the patients that are coming in,” Segarra said.
Hospital networks reported Tuesday as the busiest day for the county since the outbreak. Hospitals logged a total of 818 COVID-19 patients, which was up from 776 patients on Monday, the newspaper reports.
Fire rescue calls for COVID-19 also increased, topping 100 for the first time this month.
“Though we continue to see admissions from a variety of age groups, we are seeing younger individuals being admitted for COVID-19 treatment,” Peter Jude, a spokesman for Kendall Regional, said in a statement. “We are also experiencing a decrease in acuity with less COVID-19 patients requiring mechanical ventilation and ICU admission than during the region’s previous peak in March.”
Jackson Health CEO Carlos Migoya said a lot of the new cases are coming from lower-income communities.
“These are lower-income people that, if they don’t work, they don’t eat,” Migoya said. “Those people go out, they get infected, and then they bring it home and then they get the entire family infected.”
Migoya said it is “frustrating” that no one knows how high the case numbers will rise or how long the uptick will continue.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez told the Miami Herald that the hospitals still have room for patients, despite the increase in cases.
His office said the spike is partly due to younger residents interacting in public and not wearing masks.
The county’s management office, which oversees daily COVID-19 reports, released a summary from the state’s Health Department, which indicated one out of every three new COVID-19 cases in Miami-Dade last week fell between the ages of 18 and 34.
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