Butler Health System saw a boom of hospitalizations this week due to COVID-19 as the county added 54 new confirmed cases and two deaths over the past two days.

“We have more cases now than we did then (in the spring),” said Dr. John Love, a BHS specialist in infectious disease. “I know we've all just got through election day and things are still developing on that front. We have to move past this pandemic as a political problem and understanding it as a real illness.”

According to a report Wednesday by BHS, all 18 inpatients being treated for COVID-19 at Butler Memorial Hospital have confirmed cases of the virus, an increase of two from Monday's report. Six of those patients are being treated in the intensive care unit.

Last Friday, Butler Memorial had only seven hospitalized COVID-19 patients. From Oct. 23 to Oct. 29, Butler County averaged about two hospitalizations per day, which had increased from one hospitalization per day for many weeks before that, according to the COVID-19 Early Warning Monitoring System Dashboard.

“Even I was a bit surprised about how quickly the numbers escalated on the inpatient side,” Love said. “Some of them are related to nursing home outbreaks, but most of them are not.”

Butler County's COVID-19 numbers continued to grow, but at a slower rate than the 180 new confirmed cases reported over the weekend, according to Wednesday's report by the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

According to multiple reports, Butler County added 36 new confirmed cases Tuesday and 18 on Wednesday.

“This is what we've been warning about,” Love said. “We have to work together on this. There's no other way we're successful.”

Read more in Thursday's Butler Eagle.