January will be a sad month, health experts said.
On the bright side: two promising vaccines are now available to alleviate the relentless pandemic. On the other hand, the rate of vaccination at the national level is slower than expected, and the possible rapid spread of a mutant strain could threaten another wave of infections outside of the holidays.
“It feels like we are currently sinking into the abyss and sinking to the bottom,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Vaccination at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, said. “We will only get a little balance in our lives again until probably sometime in February.”
While the state’s death toll exceeded 350,000 on Sunday, intensive care in most of California has been heavily stressed. In Bay Area hospitals, available capacity rose Sunday to a still uncertain 8.4%, from 5.1% a day earlier, according to state health data.
“We have to go through this very dark month of January to feel better about where we are going with the pandemic,” Swartzberg said.
The greater Sacramento region was at 10.3% availability of ICUs, and the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California regions both still had no availability in their standard ICU units. Both regions rely on boom facilities to get through.
As of January 1, 414,684 vaccine doses have been administered across California. As of December 28, the state has distributed more than 1.7 million doses to health systems and hospitals.
Anthony Armada, CEO of AHMC Seton Medical Center in Daly City, said with a mutant, apparently rapidly spreading tension that arrived in the UK in California, he was confident that the vaccine would cover any variant. Seton, which has so far administered 900 vaccine doses to priority responders, occupied six of its 14 ICU beds Sunday by COVID-19 patients. A second section of 14 beds is empty due to a local shortage of ICU nurses.
“If Thanksgiving is an indication, we can predict a continuing situation from the recent holidays with the boom, which I expect will last for the rest of this month,” Armada said.
In Santa Clara County, hospitals are so crowded that health officials reported Saturday that some ambulances had to wait up to seven hours outside of emergencies until beds had to be opened.
The delays mean that ambulances are unable to respond to other calls, and that firefighters have sometimes been called in to transport people to emergencies.
There were no reports on Sunday that other counties in the Bay Area had experienced similar delays for ambulances. While there was no delay in ambulance in San Mateo County, officials “continued to monitor the situation closely,” spokesman Preston Merchant said by email, adding: “We also see this situation as a regional situation. , so the tension in the Bay could affect any hospital in the region. ”
Across California, as the crisis overwhelms hospitals in the Southern and Central Valleys, Gavin Newsom said he has activated a system of mutual assistance for hospitals, under which paramedics and other emergency technicians can be deployed in health systems for 14 days. . One recipient is Petaluma Valley Hospital in Sonoma County, which is receiving help from Solano County.
Although hospitals are struggling to keep up with the number of patients, the debate over the distribution of vaccines is growing, which some suggest is a race against time with the virus.
Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of UCSF Medicine, wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece Sunday that health leaders were hoping for more than two vaccines.
Since a single shot vaccine still provides significant protection – although it is unclear for how long – Wachter suggested that people keep their second doses a bit from what was designed as a two-shot regimen until more vaccine doses are available. In the column, together with dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, writes: ‘We were hoping that additional vaccines would now be available. But only the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been approved and are being produced more slowly than hoped. Even more worrying are the distribution bottlenecks that make it difficult to vaccinate people as quickly as possible. ”
This is an issue that has sparked lively debates among health experts, who are increasingly concerned about the possible spread of the seemingly more contagious variant that is causing the disease to rise in the UK.
Swartzberg took a different view. In an interview Sunday, he said that although he has great respect for Wachter, ‘the logistics of suddenly turning in the administration of vaccines would be very formidable, and to come back within three to four months to vaccinate people. who received only one dose, I do not know that they logistically know how to do it and whether it can be very effective if we only get one dose for many people. ”
He also said there is almost no data on what kind of immune response will be retained after one dose, and that worries me a lot. We can end this very short-lived immunity for protection and finish it off worse than before. ”
Meanwhile, evidence that the mutant strain has spread in California is still growing. San Bernardino County found two cases of the virus variant, and San Diego County found one. Experts do not doubt that it is spread much more widely, because most virus samples are not analyzed on their strain.
Even without the mutant, rapidly spreading strain becoming dominant – which, according to experts in the US, can happen as soon as spring – hospitals will continue their brutal, determined struggle. “The problem is that we will be experiencing the effects of the holidays during January, which is why it’s going to be so much worse,” Swartzberg said, noting that the boom in the first two weeks of December’s is a direct reflection of the Thanksgiving effect. ”
San Francisco Chronicle staff author Sam Whiting contributed to this report.
Tatiana Sanchez is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @TatianaYSanchez