CA hospital turns lobby into COVID unit

The influx of coronavirus patients in a small southern California hospital highlights nationwide struggles to increase patient capacity and provide quality care while awaiting approval of the COVID vaccine.

This report produced by Emma Jehle.

Like many hospitals across the U.S., Providence St.

Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, California is running out of space.

The influx of coronavirus patients has forced staff to convert the main lobby into a COVID-19 unit.

Randy Loveless is the interim director of the emergency department.

"We've had to wall this off with a temporary structure to make this an entire, this entire area of negative pressure so that we can hold more COVID patients here." The community hospital within southern California's San Bernardino County has a 212-bed capacity.

As of Tuesday, 108 of its patients are COVID-19 positive, and in other parts of the hospital, many patients are waiting in improvised areas for beds.

Quality Care Director Mendy Hickey says the problems don't stop there.

"I know today that we have 60 patients holding in our emergency department that are waiting for beds inside the hospital.

Some of them have been there as long as seven days waiting, and that is very difficult.

We're out of ratio in the majority of our inpatient units, which means that the nurses taking care of more patients than is ideal, right so, we have done a lot of creative things where we look at surgeries on a daily basis and we redeploy staff from those areas to help supplement care.

And that's really hard.

It's hard on the staff." Meanwhile, patients are being screened in the parking lot before they are admitted into a tented area for triage.

42-year-old Melissa Leon was hospitalized on Sunday.

The mother of two, who also has diabetes, says she took all precautions and is nervous to go home to her 10-year-old son.

"Now, I have to go home and take care of my son and make sure he's okay, you know?

I need to get him tested.

I need to quarantine myself.

I need to figure this all out, now.

I don't want to scare my son, but he's already scared.

He's been scared since the whole thing started." A scarcity of hospital beds was behind California's decision to re-impose lockdowns across the state this week.

But relief could be coming soon in the form of a newly approved vaccine, which the FDA could green-light in the coming days.

And Providence St.

Mary Medical Center will be ready… It's already purchased a new freezer unit for vaccine storage.