The Boone County hospital status on the COVID-19 Information Hub was moved from green to yellow Friday. This is the first time the hospital status has changed since late January.
The yellow status indicates that hospitals are "operating within standard capacity" and meeting criteria for delaying non-emergency patient transfers from referring hospitals due to staffing or capacity, or hospitals are delaying non-urgent procedures and operations to provide additional inpatient capacity.
Scott Clardy, assistant director of Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services, said the change in hospital capacity status is driven by different factors.
"The hospitals just have more people in them," Clardy said. "People who are sick with a variety of illnesses and conditions, people with planned procedures... are in there."
There are currently 49 active COVID-19 cases, with 30 hospitalizations in Boone County, and five of those are Boone County residents. Nineteen people are in the ICU, with 10 on ventilators.
"We are seeing more patients in the hospitals with COVID, but not anything nearly like what we were seeing at the end of last winter," Clardy said.
