WENATCHEE — During the last week of October, seven or eight of the patients in a full-to-capacity, 11-bed intensive-care unit at Central Washington Hospital had flu-like symptoms.

“That is a huge number for us,” said Tracey Kasnic, vice president of patient services. “You see bad flu seasons for seasonal flu, but that usually comes in February and March. But this early on is unprecedented.”

Currently, the intensive care unit is still full but the number of patients with flu-like symptoms has gone down to about three, Kasnic said.

The situation in late October prompted hospital officials to hold meetings the past two weeks to discuss ways to handle an overflow of patients if the current flu situation gets worse, she said. Attending the meeting, in addition to hospital personnel, were officials from the Chelan-Douglas Health District and the Wenatchee Valley Medical Society. Officials with Columbia Valley Community Health have been included in phone discussions.

“This isn’t just a Central Washington Hospital issue,” Kasnic said. “This is a community issue. We’re taking advice from the health district, and the medical center is our partner — their physicians staff our hospital. And they also have a hospital environment. We would try to look at how to accommodate all the patients who need hospitalization, so they would need to be part of that plan, too.”

Among the topics were where to move patients in the event of an overflow, and where to get more ventilators.

So far, Kasnic said, ventilators have not been a problem. The hospital has 13 ventilators in-house and five more in storage.

“We’ve never required more than 11 ventilators at a time for the past two weeks,” she said.

As of Friday, Kasnic said, the hospital had five people on ventilators. Three of those were influenza patients.

Officials have determined they can acquire 40 ventilators in a crisis situation, including borrowing from other health-care facilities, and turning anesthesia machines into ventilators.

Purchasing ventilators would not be an easy solution, she said, “because everyone else in the nation is experiencing what we have here.”

The intensive-care bed situation would be addressed in two ways.

First, hospital officials would convert four “swing” beds, which are now adjacent to the intensive-care unit, into intensive-care beds. Currently, those beds are used for intermediate-care patients.

Second, if even more beds were necessary, officials would move critical patients into what is called the progressive-care area. That area, also adjacent to the ICU, handles patients who are not sick enough for ICU but are too sick to be among the general population. Progressive-care patients would be placed elsewhere in the hospital.

The H1N1 situation at the hospital is on everyone’s mind but is hard to pin down, Kasnic said. While H1N1 is the main strain circulating in the community right now, lab results have only confirmed four CWH patients with the H1N1 flu since early October. All of those have since gotten well.

Tests on many other patients have come back negative for H1N1.

“I can’t explain why that is,” Kasnic said. One theory, she said, is that the flu virus was gone from the body by the time the lab samples were taken. The person may have continued to be sick from secondary infections.

Within the past 14 days, one hospital patient has died from flu-like symptoms, Kasnic said. That person’s test results were negative for H1N1 flu.

“We’re seeing an overwhelming number of patients who have tested negative for the H1N1 flu virus, which does not explain why these people are so sick,” she said. “Folks under 60 don’t get overwhelming pneumonia. It’s really rare.”

Since early October through Nov. 2, 35 patients with flu-like symptoms have been admitted to the hospital.

As of the middle of this past week, an Okanogan County adult is the first confirmed H1N1 flu death in North Central Washington. The person was not a senior, but no other details were being released because of privacy concerns for the family, said Lauri Jones, community health director for Okanogan County Public Health. Thursday, agency officials put out a news release stating the first H1N1 flu death of an Okanogan County resident was reported to them this week.

Jones declined to say when the person died but she said there was a prolonged illness involved. She said she was not aware of any underlying illness in the person who died at a hospital in the county. She declined to name the hospital.

Dee Riggs: 664-7147

deeriggs@wenatcheeworld.com