Butte County prepares for possible spike in coronavirus cases

With concerns for a possible coronavirus surge, Action News Now reached out to local hospitals and the public health department about a plan.

Hospitals around butte county are preparing for any potential spike in coronavirus cases.

Action news now reporter christina vitale spoke with butte county public health and local hospitals about the current plan.

Lisa almaguer pio: we are a prepared as we can be at this moment lisa almaguer with butte county health says the state is monitoring the county's data and will reach out if they see any concerning trends.

Almaguer: or changes in the identified metrics for our county and at that point they will be identified early and they'll be able to offer support whether that's technical or physical support to help us respond almaguer says monitoring data by the state includes three areas... testing capacity, contact tracing and contact investigation capacity and hospital surge.

Almaguer: we could reach out to the state and like i said the state will reach out to us and we can ask for that field medical station to be redeployed in butte county to help with that suge capacity standup: i spoke with a doctor here at the oroville hospital he tells they're prepared if there was a possible surge.

Head of infection control, dr. roy shannon says they're keeping close tabs on personal protective equipment and pharmaceuticals.

Shannon: while we are doing some necessary surgeries we are always cognizant of the fact that if we have a surge we might have to back off of that shannon told action news now there are measures in place for creating open bed spaces.

Shannon: there's a couple of places in the hospital we could put more inpatients if we had to we dont normally do that but its any area that we normally do our ambulatory care services and if we had a big surge those would drop off and we would have a few more rooms there shannons says the hospital has