ST. LOUIS — The member hospitals of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force surpassed 4,000 COVID-19 discharges Monday.
The task force — which tracks COVID-19 data from BJC HealthCare, Mercy, SSM Health, St. Luke’s Hospital — announced Tuesday that the systems combined to discharge their 4,000th COVID-19 patient the previous day. The task force said area hospitals discharged 41 more patients Monday, bringing the total to 4,023.
"Thank you to all of the health care providers and the people that support them for getting these patients better able to go back home to their loved ones," Dr. Alex Garza, incident commander of the task force, said when announcing previous discharge numbers during Monday's briefing.
Dr. Garza said it is always good news to see COVID-19 patients getting out of the hospital and back to their families, but a high number of discharges also means there are a lot of COVID-19 patients in the hospital.
"Again, it's great to see this many people recovering and being released back home," Dr. Garza said Monday. "But it also means that we have increased numbers in our hospitals. And so we're going to continue to see those high numbers of discharges for quite some time."
On Tuesday, the task force reported 55 new COVID-19 admissions, the second time that number has surpassed 50 in the last week. Dr. Garza said there is cause for concern any time the number of new admissions is higher than 40. The seven-day rolling average of new admissions was 44 Tuesday and has been higher than 40 for the last four days.
Here are the numbers from the task force on Tuesday:
- New hospital admissions (data lagged two days) increased – from 33 yesterday to 55 today.
- The seven-day moving average of hospital admissions (data lagged two days) increased – from 42 yesterday to 44 today.
- The seven-day moving average of hospitalizations increased - from 252 yesterday to 258 today.
- Inpatient confirmed COVID positive hospitalizations decreased - from 290 yesterday to 286 today.
- Inpatient suspected COVID positive hospitalizations decreased – from 179 yesterday to 178 today.
- The number of confirmed COVID positive patients in the ICUs decreased – from 72 yesterday to 70 today.
- The number of confirmed COVID positive patients on ventilators increased – from 30 yesterday to 34 today.
- Across the system hospitals, 41 COVID-19 patients were discharged yesterday, bringing the cumulative number of COVID-19 patients discharged to 4,023.