State wide hospitalizations, case numbers and percent positives are all continuing to improve significantly. Despite a continuing positive decline they all remain higher than the thresholds for pandemic control. We need to continue with our existing effective interventions continue to support this decline quickly back to more manageable numbers we saw last spring and summer.
Our local numbers have continued to improve this week with a manageable census, less than 10 COVID inpatients, only one vent patient and no inpatient holding in the ED this morning (7th day in a row). We did see an increase in our ICU census with the number of COVID patients needing critical care rising from 1 to 3. As a result our current overall operational status is Yellow today.
Exeter continues operating under its Incident Command (IC), crisis response structure but we are also beginning to lower some of the protective precautions we were forced to put into place as this current wave grew. We have begun to allow limited visitation for our normal medical surgical patients (1 visitor for 2 hours) and will look to continue to open up visitation as our numbers continue to improve. For an update on our visitation policy visit Exeter Hospital - COVID-19.
According to the State’s website we still have over 40% of the NH population who are unvaccinated and therefore at serious risk from the virus. Therefore we continuing to strongly encourage our legislators, towns, schools and local businesses to continue to support masking, vaccinations, boosters, social distancing, hand washing and staying home when people are experiencing symptoms. All of us want to get the pandemic under control as quickly as possible.
Our numbers are dropping very quickly thanks to the precautions all of us have put in place. The worst thing we can do is pause our effective efforts too early and sacrifice the significant progress we are now making.
If you have further questions let me know and I will work to respond to them in future updates.
Our next update will be on Monday 2/14.