PLACERVILLE, Calif. — Since the start of the pandemic, Marshall Medical Center nurses and doctors have found ways to meet the El Dorado County community where they were.
When the Caldor fire hit and people were suddenly displaced, they rerouted their services to evacuation shelters, offering medical care, consults and also COVID-19 testing and vaccinations; it was all to prevent further spread in the community.
“It’s been an interesting year and a half,” said Dr. Samuel Ceridon, a family medicine physician at Marshall Medical Center in Placerville. “Recently, we’ve been going out to evacuation camps and taking care of medical needs for those who have been displaced by the Caldor Fire.”
Dr. Ceridon and other hospital employees delivered everything from prescriptions to inhalers for evacuees.
“When we get their medication or their inhaler or even some wound care in the back of my truck, they’ve been pretty happy to be taken care of,” he said.
Hospital staff had also been offering COVID-19 testing and vaccinations at evacuation centers, which Dr. Ceridon said was nothing new. He and his team had adopted a boots-on-the-ground approach since the start of the pandemic.
“We’ve been concerned for the last few months that we’d see that spike,” he explained. “And then the fire kind of changed everything.”
He said the number of COVID-19 cases in shelters was not overwhelming, but he was concerned that, with the close proximity of people at evacuation centers, they might face further case spikes in the near future. And as one of the few hospitals in the area, they couldn’t afford the surge.
“On the in-patient side, our ER has been running 110%, 120%, 130%,” Dr. Ceridon said. “I’ve been to meetings on the in-patient side where they’re saying we have 16 patients with COVID and we have one bed left and then the very next meeting, we have 19 patients with COVID. So, they’ve been magically increasing their capacity to meet the need, and... on the out-patient side, our team’s been working to keep that need from rising even more.”
With maxed-out capacity at Marshall Medical Center, he said they were doing what they could to help the community and prevent what he called a “county-wide super spreader event.”
