LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Strict home orders were renewed indefinitely for much of California, a leading U.S. focal point of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tuesday, as the state’s top health official said many hospitals were faltering. of crisis.
Strict restrictions on social and economic life earlier this month have been extended in densely populated Southern California – home to more than half of the state’s 40 million people – based on data showing that intensive care units are likely to last weeks or almost filled will continue to come.
The stay-at-home orders, one of the strictest in the United States, are also being renewed in the agricultural heartland of the San Joaquin Valley, whose hospital need has also remained for weeks with little or no space to spare.
Mark Ghaly, California’s secretary of health and human services, said Los Angeles County, the most populous county, was particularly hard hit by weeks of major infections and hospitalizations.
According to him, at least 90 percent of the provincial hospitals were stretched so thin by the influx of COVID-19 patients that they were forced to divert incoming emergency patients to other facilities this past weekend.
No hospitals have yet formally notified public health authorities that they have reached the point of working on a “crisis care basis,” which involves major medicine and medical treatment to the sickest patients, Ghaly said.
However, he added: “some hospitals in Southern California have introduced practices that would be part of crisis care”, such as “weighing ‘the effectiveness of certain treatments for certain patients who are unlikely to survive, or who are going to do well’ .
Ghaly said he knows of no cases so drastically that doctors had to choose to choose, for example, between two patients who had to be placed in a ventilator if only one was available. But he said hospital managers are doing everything in their power to prepare for deteriorating conditions to avoid such serious situations.
“We could see the worst of it in early January,” he told reporters in an online briefing. “And most of the hospital leaders I spoke to in Southern California are exactly for that.”
The gloomy projections are based on the expectation that many individuals will continue to disregard the warnings and commands of public health to disregard crowds and unnecessary travel for the rest of the winter holidays, which fuels further increases in coronavirus transmissions.
Authorities want to prevent the weakening of the state’s healthcare system as much as possible until the newly approved COVID-19 vaccines can be made widely available to the public in the spring.
Residents under home orders should for the time being largely stay indoors and avoid travel, except when necessary for permitted activities such as grocery stores, medical appointments, individual outdoor exercises, and dog walks.
Restrictions were also placed on numerous commercial activities, with restaurants restricted to pick-up and drop-off services and pubs closed.
The orders can be canceled as soon as projections show that the available ICU capacity of a region will reach at least 15%.
The San Francisco Bay Area and greater Sacramento are under the same constraints, with ICU capacities being approximately 10% and 19%, respectively. They each present their first three-week review early next month.
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; edited by Grant McCool