Hospitalization of COVID-19 patients is now at an all-time high in San Joaquin County.

Twenty-seven people were in the hospital of 2:30 p.m. Monday due to the severity of their COVID-19 illness. That is five more than the previous peak of 22 on May 15 and six more than last Friday.

An additional person succumbed to the coronavirus since Friday bringing the death count in the county to 37.

In a bid to reduce the spread of the virus, county health officials are stressing that people wear masks when they are in public places such as stores as well as advising people to maintain 6-foot social distancing.

San Joaquin County Public Health Services is in need of volunteers to be trained as contact tracers. The unpaid volunteers help county health officials to determine what people COVID-19 patients were around during a critical period of several days prior to them suffering symptoms. If you are interested email volunteer@sjcphs.org and include “contact tracer” in the subject line.

While an increase in hospitalizations was expected as reopening has taken place it is substantially below peaks in projections experts made if social distancing wasn’t imposed and under the stay at home and social distancing measures that were put in place.

There were 27 people ill enough with COVID-19 to be in San Joaquin County hospitals as of Monday is in stark contrast with the 768 new cases requiring hospital admissions that had been projected on the peak day of April 30 under the model county health officials have been using if aggressive stay at home orders and social distancing had not been implemented.

The same experts who made that model projected with social distancing daily hospital admissions would peak at 299 on May 30.  There was less than one new hospitalization a day last week or 1/299th of what the peak had been projected almost two weeks ago.

The projected number of daily intensive care unit admissions with social distancing was modeled to peak at 90 on May 30 instead of 230 on April 30 without any restrictions in place.  The running total of county ICU patients since the start of the pandemic has been 87. The model projected 60 people on May 30 would have to go on ventilators or six more than have even been placed in ICU so far.

There have been 1,195 confirmed cases since the start of March. Of those, 794 have recovered meaning 401 people out of 760,000 residents are currently ill with COVID-19.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com