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Sarasota Memorial Hospital hits record high for COVID-19 patients

“You need to wear a mask everywhere you go and take this seriously,” hospital CEO David Verinder said.

SARASOTA, Fla. — Sarasota Memorial Hospital hit a record high of positive COVID-19 patients in its hospital Friday since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.

“I don’t think any of us really realized just how much of a marathon this would be,” hospital CEO David Verinder said.

Doctors at Sarasota Memorial have been treating COVID-19 patients since early March. Through it all, they’ve seen their hospitalizations go up and down. Things were starting to look better as the number of hospitalizations at SMH went down.

On May 10, the hospital had 43 COVID-19 patients. On June 4, the number dropped to only nine COVID-19 patients.

“I got to tell you, in May we thought we had a great story going,” Verinder said. “Our COVID census had dropped all the way down to eight patients and zero patients in the ICU even for a couple of days.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t last long.

On June 30, the hospitalizations jumped to 50 COVID-19 patients. This new number surpasses doctors' previous peak of 43 patients in May.

From there, the numbers continued going up. On July 2, SMH admitted more patients to their hospital, bringing its total to 56. Of those 56 patients, 16 of them were in the intensive care unit.

“The current trend is troubling,” Verinder said. “We’ve seen our census double in the last week and a half.”

SMH added five more patients Friday to their COVID unit, bringing the total to 61. Fourteen of those patients are in the ICU. To date, it's the highest hospitalizations they’ve experienced since the outbreak.

“We keep seeing record number of cases in the state of Florida come around and it’s concerning for hospitals, but it ought to be concerning for every citizen in this state,” Verinder said.

SMH takes in the majority of COVID-19 patients in the Sarasota area. Verinder says we need to get this virus under control.

“You need to wear a mask everywhere you go and take this seriously,” Verinder said. “I also know it’s summertime in Florida and it’s very hot outside, but we all need to make those kinds of sacrifices to make sure we get this disease under control.”

Many major cities are trying to help stop the spread by passing a mask mandate, requiring people to wear face coverings inside businesses and in areas where you can not properly social distance.

The city of Sarasota’s mandatory mask ordinance just went into effect Wednesday. Longboat Key and Lakeland followed suit, passing their own countywide mask mandate Thursday.

But even with the growing number of positive cases, Sarasota County commissioners refuse to follow the trend of implementing a mask mandate.

RELATED: Florida lawmakers demand Gov. DeSantis issue statewide mask mandate

RELATED: Tampa Bay mask mandates: Who has them, what they mean

In a budget workshop on Wednesday, July 1, Sarasota County commissioners appeared to be on the same page, with none of them wanting to “waste hours talking about this topic.”

10 Tampa Bay reached out to each commissioner to see if the rising number of hospitalizations at SMH has changed their mind on the idea of making face masks mandatory.

The only commissioner to respond was Charles Hines of District 5.

“We are getting daily reports as I'm sure you are in regard to the hospital bed capacity,” Hines said. “Also, with Hillsborough and Pinellas having implemented the mandatory masks ahead of us, that will allow us to compare and contrast their hospital admissions to ours and if it needs to be reconsidered, we meet again Tuesday and Wednesday next week.”

Hines also brought up the point that the majority of COVID-19 positive tests are coming out of the city of Sarasota, not the county.

“If you look at the map concentration of COVID positive test by zip code, a lot of them tend to be in the city of Sarasota and therefore their mandatory mask policy, if it's going to make a difference, should be seen in the statistics,” Hines said.

Verinder says Sarasota Memorial is prepared if they see the number of hospitalizations continue to double.

“We have a number of contingency plans on the table if we have more patients come in,” Verinder said. “Certainly, hope that’s not going to be the case but we have plenty of ventilators on site and we have ICU rooms that we could increase our ICUs from 62 to over 100.”

SMH has a command center made up of hospital leadership and medical staff who meet multiple times per day to review the information they receive from the state and local officials, as well as hospital capacity.

By assessing and projecting their needs, this group would ultimately make the decision to move to any one of their numerous contingency plans.

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