Health officials in the severely affected Los Angeles County have issued their most serious warning to date about the COVID-19 crisis, saying on Monday that struggling hospitals are in danger of running out of space, especially with the looming threat of a new upsurge with Christmas. that the province could achieve 10,000 total coronavirus deaths within a few days.
Hospitals are so flooded that they have resorted to placing patients in conference rooms or gift shops. Some struggle with aging and inadequate infrastructure that can disrupt the flow of life-saving oxygen.
New daily cases count, although not climbing exponentially as earlier in the boom, but alarmingly high.
The most tragic of all is that the virus kills Angelenos at a tremendous rate. The province is aiming for 10,000 total coronavirus-related deaths, and will reach that once unimaginable milestone within a few days.
On Christmas Eve, 140 people nationwide died from COVID-19 – an average of one deaths about every ten minutes, according to data compiled by The Times.
“These are figures that cannot be normalized,” land superintendent Hilda Solis said during an information session on Monday. “Like the sound of ambulance sirens, we can’t fix it.”
And officials say dark days are almost certainly at hand.
“No matter how bad it is, the worst is yet to come,” said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director of the province’s health services, said.
According to the latest state data, there are 7,181 coronavirus-positive patients hospitalized in LA County, of which 1,449 are in intensive care. Both of these figures are the highest ever seen in the pandemic.
Ghaly said Monday that about 50% of the beds currently staffed in the province, and just over two-thirds of the beds for intensive care units, are filled by COVID-19 patients.
In light of the deteriorating situation, Governor Gavin Newsom announced Monday that the state will include a new team in LA province to encourage cargo suspension and greater coordination between hospitals. ‘
He pointed out that a healthcare system that is overwhelming and overburdened harms those who need professional care – not just those infected with the coronavirus.
“The routine care of emergencies is being delayed,” he said. ‘If you think it’s not affecting you, if you somehow think you’re immune to the impact of COVID: there’s the direct impact, and that’s the transmission of this virus. There is the indirect impact: God forbid, you have a stroke or a heart attack, you have a car accident or other acute care needs. The impact of this virus, this pandemic, is being felt throughout the hospital system. ”
According to the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the situation reached a “massive crisis” on Sunday night, according to Dr. Brad Spellberg.
There was no single bed available for at least 30 patients in need of intensive or mid-level care, Spellberg said, and the hospital had to close its doors to all ambulance traffic for 12 hours.
Some patients, including some who were very ill and in need of intensive oxygen, experienced waiting times of as long as 18 hours.
“We were just completely overwhelmed,” Spellberg said, adding that the hospital is trying to “forge daily, hourly solutions to get us through this crisis.”
The conditions in the hospital – one of the largest trauma centers in the Western USA – have gradually deteriorated since Thanksgiving, with an average of 10 new COVID-19 patients arriving daily.
According to Spellberg, as of Monday, the hospital had about 240 COVID-19 patients in all parts of the hospital, which was almost twice as many as the previous surge in July.
And the expected ‘Christmas bump’ has not even started yet.
“When you walk into the ICU and see every bed occupied by a ventilated COVID patient, with tubes coming into all openings of their body, you begin to understand that we are not dealing with what we were dealing with ten months ago. had to do, “Spellberg said.
Hospitals across the country and the country have already been forced to take important steps to address the flood of COVID-19 patients – such as postponing some procedures, keeping patients in ambulances for hours until space becomes available and some to move patients who would normally be in the ICU to other parts of the hospital.
However, these measures can only go so far, and health officials warn that capacity is not only limited by physical space, but also by the scarcity of trained staff.
If the medical system is stretched too far, officials warn that there are not enough staff or resources to provide critical care to all who need it, which will significantly increase the chances of patients dying.
“The sad reality is that all the indicators are telling us that our situation can only get worse if we start in 2021,” said LA County Provincial Health Director Barbara Ferrer. “The distribution rate of the community remains extremely high and this has burdened our hospital system as more COVID-19 patients continue to flow in addition to the thousands of patients who are already fighting for their lives.”
In extreme circumstances, hospitals may be forced to ration – with doctors no longer doing everything in their power to save a life, but rather concentrating on the way resources and equipment can be best used.
Huntington Hospital in Pasadena is now warning in an information sheet for patients and their families about the grim possibility.
If the situation ‘comes to a point that our hospital has a shortage that will affect our ability to care for all patients’, officials wrote, then a clinical committee consisting of doctors, a member of the community , a bioethicist, a spiritual care provider and other experts. “Will review the cases of all critically ill patients” and “make the necessary decisions regarding the allocation of limited medical resources based on the best medical information possible, and will use the same decision criteria used in all patient cases nationally and throughout California . ”
“It deflates the bed staff to the bed to make decisions about the treatment of scarce resources, and rather delegates it to a committee that will follow an ethical framework for decision-making,” hospital officials added in a statement Monday. ‘It is important that no one makes a care decision and that the committee does not provide information about patient race, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, insurance or any other information not related to the patient’s health.
“We are, as always, committed to providing compassionate care to all and thank our frontline health workers, doctors and staff who help run our hospital,” the statement said.
Kaiser Permanente also delivers non-urgent and elective surgeries and procedures at its facilities throughout California.
The statement remains in effect until Jan. 10 in Kaiser’s Southern California region and Jan. 4 in Northern California, according to health care consortium statements.
In Southern California, Kaiser also does not plan new electoral operations until the end of January.
Cancer-related surgeries will continue, as well as procedures in “any situation in which the postponement of an operation will have a negative effect on the patient’s medical condition, including pain,” officials said in a statement.
The return of less urgent procedures is needed, officials said Monday, “to respond to the current and predicted increase in COVID-19 cases” and to set up free staff “to focus on supporting COVID-19 care . “
“We are facing an unprecedented surge of patients with COVID-19, and the number of available ICU beds continues to decline,” Kaiser officials said in a statement Monday. ‘Last week, 52% of our admitted patients in Southern California were treated for COVID-19. Today, that number has risen to 82%. ”
Due to the large number of patients, Kaiser is “converting and using every available space, including former conference rooms, waiting rooms, recovery areas and other non-traditional areas in the hospital.”
“We are very proud of the expertise and compassion that our employees and physicians have shown every moment over the past nine months, and continue to provide amidst the current increase in COVID-19 in our communities,” the statement continued. ‘But the current boom means our nurses, doctors and all our staff – who are already stretched and tired – need to expand even more to care for more and more patients. We are very concerned about what will happen in the coming days and weeks if we do not all act to slow down the spread of this virus. ”
As of Sunday, the latest day for which full data is available, there were 19,766 coronavirus-positive patients hospitalized across the country – an all-time high and 45% more than two weeks ago.
Of those patients, 4,228 were in intensive care, also a record.
Health officials fear that the numbers will only continue to balloon if the state experiences a surge of infections as a result of the Christmas trip and gatherings.
The COVID-19 patients who are in the hospital now reflect cases of coronavirus that were diagnosed two weeks earlier. This means that hospitals are expected to continue to see increasing demand in the new year due to infections that occurred in early December.
Any Christmas outage would take weeks to fully assess, but officials warned that the health care system did not happen with another boom, such as after Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately, government officials said Monday they think there is likely to be another increase in the holiday season.
“We definitely expect the middle of January to be a pretty difficult time in our hospitals, where the cases this week and next are really starting to pile up – affecting the emergencies, our hospital wards and our ICU spaces,” said Dr. . Mark Ghaly, secretary of health and human services, said in California.
There is real fear that such a ‘boom on top of a boom’ could be too much for overworked hospital staff.
“It’s a very, very different and infinitely more dangerous situation if hospitals are experiencing a boom when staff are exhausted, they are thinly stretched and are caring for more patients than they can safely handle,” Christina Ghaly said.
Earlier this month, the state imposed strict restrictions on businesses and activities in hopes of stopping the racketeering.
Although the wave of new cases of coronavirus has continued to swell since then, officials have noted that the rate of increase, coupled with the number of new coronavirus-related hospitalizations, appears to be in many areas.
“We’re seeing now that a majority of the states are experiencing a new plateau admission in the hospital … actually seeing the growth rate start to decline, with one big exception – and that’s Southern California,” Newsom said in Los Angeles , The provinces of Riverside and San Bernardino still report heavy infection numbers.