Sacramento first responders, doctors urge against ER visits for mild COVID or testing

Sacramento County health officials, first responders and emergency room doctors are amplifying their pleas for residents to avoid calling 911 or going to an ER for a mild case of COVID-19 or for COVID-19 testing.

“While Sacramento County is starting to see a plateau of new COVID-19 cases, the number of daily cases is still extremely high and our hospitals are overwhelmed,” a county health spokesperson wrote in a Thursday news release.

Mild symptoms of coronavirus that do not require hospital treatment include cough, sore throat, congestion, low-grade fever, headaches and fatigue, county health officials said.

Severe symptoms that would warrant emergency services include difficulty breathing, chest pain or a very high fever.

The Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District, which provides emergency services for the county outside of Sacramento city limits, said in social media posts Thursday that 18 ambulances were parked at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento on Wednesday evening, “with patients waiting on the hospital wall for a bed.”

“This creates a major problem for the pre-hospital 911 system because there are fewer units available to respond” to emergencies throughout the county, the tweet continued.

Ambulances have had to wait eight hours or longer to offload patients, according to Metro Fire.

“We’re seeing an overwhelming number of patients in the emergency department, and it’s due to all reasons,” Dr. Nick Sawyer, an emergency physician at the hospital, said on a Facebook Live discussion Thursday hosted by UC Davis Health.

He noted that UC Davis Medical Center is a Level I trauma center, meaning its emergency room treats everything from car accidents and gunshot wounds to heart attacks. A flood of mild COVID-19 cases leaves fewer resources to handle those emergencies.

“People are coming in for all the things we usually see in the emergency department ... but we’re also seeing a huge number of patients coming into the emergency department for coronavirus testing.”

Sacramento County as of Wednesday had 615 COVID-positive patients across all of its hospitals, the county’s highest total of the pandemic and nearly 100 more patients than the peak of the winter 2020 surge.

With the surge of the highly contagious omicron variant, the county’s daily case rate for COVID-19 exploded to more than 200 per 100,000 residents, compared to a pre-omicron record of 64 per 100,000.

The county on its local health office data dashboard this week reported that COVID-19 made up about 15% of all hospital emergency room visits for the weeks ending Jan. 2 and Jan. 9. That’s higher than the winter 2020 surge or last year’s delta variant surge, which each peaked at about 10%.

Between recent emergency department visits and 911 calls, about 25% “are simply experiencing mild symptoms and are looking for a COVID-19 test,” county health spokeswoman Janna Haynes said in a statement Thursday.

“This is not a good use of our emergency services systems,” Haynes said in a video statement.

Emergency rooms by law cannot deny medical care, meaning that once a patient arrives they cannot be turned away — even if the treatment sought is not a true emergency — which is another reason health officials continue to reiterate the point.

“We recommend that you go to an urgent care if you have mild symptoms,” Sawyer said. “If you have a cold and you’re looking for a test ... urgent care would be a good place for that.”

Residents should contact their health care provider, go to a dedicated community testing site or purchase an at-home rapid test rather than visit an emergency room for testing, the county said in its news release.

The federal government launched a program this week that will send four free at-home tests by the end of January to all residential addresses that request them.