The dreaded increase in coronavirus cases appears to be happening in Los Angeles County, with a new increase in cases as hospitals are already in crisis due to the Thanksgiving boom.
Los Angeles County posted its third-highest one-day total for coronavirus cases on New Year’s Day, reporting 19,063 cases. This means that over the past seven days, an average of more than 16,000 new coronavirus cases have been reported in the country per day – about 12 times the comparative figure from 1 November and the highest figure ever recorded.
The province saw particularly aggressive growth in coronavirus daily cases in mid-December, but then new cases flattened out over the past week and a half, typically adding 13,000 to 14,800 new cases per day.
The report reported Friday pushed the average number of new coronavirus cases daily to 16,077 over the past week – at exactly the same time that epidemiologists had warned that people infected during the Christmas holidays would become contagious.
The province also recorded a high death toll on Friday – 193 deaths, the fourth highest death toll in a single day. New Year’s Day follows three consecutive days of record deaths reported in one day – 242 on Tuesday, 262 on Wednesday and 291 on Thursday. A total of 988 deaths were reported during this four-day period.
Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, medical epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said he believes the new peak in the daily average number of coronavirus cases is the beginning of the increase in coronavirus cases from the Christmas holiday.
Kim-Farley said he expects there will be more and more daily cases of coronavirus over the next two weeks as people exposed to the virus during Christmas and New Year get sick and tested.
Kim-Farley said he expects hospitals to be at their peak by the end of January. The daily number of COVID-19 deaths is expected to peak by mid-February.
“As people will hopefully travel less and have fewer gatherings in their homes after these recent rugby festivities … we should see a slump in the disease by the end of January,” Kim-Farley said. said.
The number of daily cases of coronavirus in late winter should also start to decline because a large number of people who eventually survive the coronavirus infection will develop immunity to the virus, Kim-Farley said.
This level of protection will not lead to a complete “herd immunity” that protects the full population, but ‘it should lead to a decrease in the number of new cases among those who do not follow public health guidelines on masking and physical distance -Farley said.
It is only when 70% to 85% of the population has received the vaccine, which according to Kim-Farley will take place by early summer, that ‘true herd immunity will begin to reflect in a faster decline in the number of new cases in the population, ”said Kim-Farley. “By late summer or early fall, we should be able to return to a semblance of our life in the pre-COVID era, with limited restrictions on our activities, businesses and schools.”
Before the numbers for LA County were announced Friday, Kim-Farley said he expects the pandemic in LA County to worsen soon due to the amount of travel observed during Christmas and New Year.
Despite the gloomy outlook for the coming weeks, Kim-Farley said: ‘I have no doubt that if we did not have the order to stay at home, the situation would be much worse than it is now. However, I think the range of numbers shows that many people choose to ignore it in the light of the stay-at-home order, and without mixing up enforcement, this mixing up of households and parties continues to take place. ”
The death toll had already increased in December, mainly due to the fact that people massively, tired of the pandemic, ignored the pleas of officials to stay home for Thanksgiving and decided to gather with friends and family during the holidays. 2,073 COVID-19 deaths were reported in LA County in December, by far the deadliest month of the pandemic and more than four times worse than the November death toll of 585 in November.
Hospitals in the LA province are overwhelmed by the pandemic, and most are forced to turn away ambulances for much of the day as medical institutions move under the weight of an unprecedented demand for critical hospital care. Hospitals’ mortuaries and private funeral homes are so full of corpses that the National Guard has been asked to help with efforts to temporarily store the corpses at the office of the medical examiner’s coroner.
LA County is considered particularly vulnerable in a pandemic as one of the largest metropolises in the country with some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the country. The province, where more than 10 million people live, suffers in a number of neighborhoods from high poverty and expensive housing leading to overcrowded homes. Southern California also has a large number of essential workers who have to leave their homes to work, many of whom work in food factories and warehouses, where the virus can also spread easily.
Some patients wait up to nine hours in waiting rooms with low blood pressure and low oxygen levels. Several facilities report that their oxygen supplies are becoming dangerously low. Some patients transported by ambulance wait up to eight hours to be dropped off at emergencies. There are fears that people suffering from strokes, heart attacks and seizures will not get the quick attention they need.
Because so many COVID-19 patients suffer from inflamed lungs that make them gasp for air, some aging hospital systems could not keep up with the demand for high fluid oxygen that had to be carried into their lungs. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to send teams to the region to update oxygen delivery systems at a handful of hospitals.
By Friday night, local health law in LA County counted 790,582 cumulative cases of coronavirus and 10,552 COVID-19 deaths. Since LA County has an average of 16,077 new coronavirus cases per day, the country is likely to indicate its 800,000th coronavirus case in the coming days.
As of Friday night, California has averaged 339 COVID-19 deaths per day in the past week, a record. The state also averages about 40,000 new coronavirus cases per day, just slightly below the peak of 45,000 new cases per day recorded in mid-December.
Cumulatively, California has recorded 2.3 million cases of coronavirus and more than 26,000 COVID-19 deaths.
Other parts of the state are also struggling with overcrowded hospitals.
In Santa Clara County, hospitals are stretched to the limit, with 50 to 60 patients sitting in emergencies every day waiting for a hospital bed. Often, the only way a patient can move into a bed for intensive care units is when a COVID-19 patient has died, dr. Marco Randazzo, an emergency physician at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose and the St. Gilroy, told reporters Thursday.
Officials said the daily case of coronavirus in Santa Clara County is more than ten times as high as on Oct. 30.
“This has been the state of the pandemic for the past few weeks, and it shows no signs of disappointment,” said Dr. Ahmad Kamal, director of the country’s health preparedness, said. “What we see now is not normal.”
Kamal pleaded with the public not to stop wearing masks, staying socially distant and canceling gatherings. He said there are some indications that Santa Clara County, in the days after Christmas, avoided the more dramatic deterioration in the hospital conditions it had after Thanksgiving.
“It shows that actions matter,” Kamal said. ‘Although it seems useless, given how much business we are [at] and how common COVID is in our community, we know that our decisions and actions drive the curve of this pandemic. ”
But many hospitals are already at the breaking point, and officials fear that a boom in Christmas will make things worse.
On Friday, the number of Californians who died as a result of the complications of COVID-19 passed 26,000 – about the same number of Californians who, in a recent year, died of complications from flu, diabetes, high blood pressure and liver disease combined.
Residents of Southern California mostly stayed home on New Year’s Eve and heeded the warnings of public health officials, but several large gatherings were still held throughout the region, including one by Christian activist Sean Feucht, who estimated 2,500 mostly unmasked attendees after a church car park in Valencia.
Despite the risks of spreading the coronavirus amid a deadly surge in the pandemic, people can be seen standing shoulder to shoulder as they jump, sing and shout in a video posted by Feucht’s Instagram account . Most people did not wear face masks.
Earlier Thursday night, actor Kirk Cameron and others gathered at Point Mugu Beach in Ventura County, according to the ABC-7 video and other news sources.
“We need to listen to the voice of God, rather than being distracted by the noise of people. “And let’s be a year of trumpets and shouting in 2021,” Cameron said in a video posted on his Instagram page, which showed a crowd screaming and clapping in response to his sermon. Most people did not wear masks.
Times writers Cindy Carcamo and Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.