Los Angeles County reported more than 300 new COVID-19 deaths on Friday, the highest single day to date.
According to preliminary, incomplete numbers issued by local health jurisdictions, the province has experienced at least 309 additional deaths – a figure that would easily break the previous high of 291, recorded on New Year’s Eve.
The self-reported record was on the one-year anniversary of the country’s first coronavirus health warning.
During the 12-month period, the warning called ‘outbreak of pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan City, China’ changed into the ‘most important infectious disease’ of the previous century, Drs. Paul Simon, chief scientific officer, said. for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
“The magnitude of the tragedy associated with this pandemic is unfathomable, even more so because so much of it was preventable,” he said during a briefing on Friday.
Cumulatively, LA County has reported at least 889,000 cases of coronavirus and at least 11,800 deaths. More than half a million cases of coronavirus and more than 4,300 deaths have been reported since Thanksgiving.
And given what happened this past holiday season, Simon said that “we expect the number of hospitalizations and deaths to remain high during this month.”
The leader of a trade group representing hospitals in California said Friday that the peak of the current wave is expected to overwhelm the state’s health care system in a week or so.
Although hospitals across the country already have record numbers of COVID-19 patients, “we expect the worst of these to hit in another week or ten days, and that it could last until February,” Carmela Coyle said. president and CEO of California Hospital Assn.
“It was unprecedented for our state, unprecedented for the country, unprecedented for the world,” she said during a conference. “But we find ourselves today, in terms of numbers, at a point where we are standing on a beach and watching a tsunami arrive.”
California currently adds, on average, just under 40,000 new cases of coronavirus each day – a rate that has recently flattened out but is still massive and has equal consequences.
State officials said about 12% of people diagnosed with coronavirus infections should be hospitalized. If the calculation is true, the approximately 278,000 cases confirmed worldwide since New Year’s Day will eventually end up in the coming weeks with approximately 33,000 Californians in hospitals.
As for the effects of COVID-19 on the hospital system, ‘the story was written weeks before, and it is this delay between viral spread and infection and the need for acute care,’ Coyle said.
“We were all hoping that we would start to see some decline in these numbers,” she said. “That was not the case.”
Health officials have long pointed out that the progress of the pandemic is predictable and inevitable. People become infected with the virus and within about two weeks some become ill enough to require hospitalization. Shortly thereafter, the condition of some patients will worsen to the point that they require intensive care, and some of them will die.
The deterioration of the disease causes it to take weeks to fully assess the consequences of the actions of residents and businesses. It also takes weeks before renewed personal vigilance or newly imposed restrictions begin to show results.
Health officials said the current boom in California began around Nov. 1, but was kicked in excess in early December – fueled by travel and gatherings during the Thanksgiving holiday.
It is worrying that a similar pattern will soon hit the state in the wake of the winter holidays.
While hospital populations change frequently as new patients arrive and existing people are discharged or die, the California health care system is already thinned by the relentless boom, and there are fears that it will be difficult to deal with more.
As of Thursday, the most recent day for which full data is available, there were 21,855 coronavirus-positive patients in California, with 4,812 in intensive care.
Although the number of patients is no longer rising at the rate it was weeks ago and has fluctuated slightly over the past few days, it has continued to rise by 15% since Christmas. More COVID-19 patients also need intensive care.
Because the number of newly infected Californians is still high, there is no short-term relief in sight.
“We expect another 15,000 individuals to require inpatient hospital care between January 18 and 18,” Coyle said. “It’s a difficult situation. It’s stiff. And it’s tense. ”
Unless the transfer is controlled, hospitals throughout LA County and the state will continue to be overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients.
In LA County, hospitalizations stabilized at a high number, hovering between 7,900 and 8,100 from Monday to Thursday. While the province has recently avoided the strong growth seen earlier in the boom, officials have warned that the level of hospitalizations is unsustainable because they have already plunged the healthcare system into a crisis, created a shortage of available ambulances and patients were forced to wait for hours on beds. to open.
Another surge, according to officials, could potentially force hospitals to provide rations if resources and staff are too thin.
“I think it’s hard for a lot of us to relate to what our nurses and doctors and other hospital leaders are currently doing,” Coyle said. “There is no doubt that people who have dedicated their lives to caring for and healing them see in some parts of the state things they have never seen before.”
So many people are dying of COVID-19 in Los Angeles County that government officials are now planning to erect temporary morgues to deal with the number of corpses.
The move was announced Thursday by the California Governor’s Office for Emergency Services – the same day LA County reported 205 new deaths due to COVID-19 and the third consecutive day more than 200 Angelenos were killed in the pandemic.
LA County has averaged an average of 171 COVID-19 deaths per day in the past week, and officials have warned that the toll will only continue to rise unless the region can contain the raging coronavirus.
“We’ve lost way too many lives to COVID-19 in LA County, and unfortunately we will continue to lose more until we can all get to work together to break the distribution chain,” said Barbara Ferrer, director of public health. said this week.
State officials said one temporary morgue will be located in a parking lot next to the coroner’s office in LA and will include at least a dozen 53-foot trailers provided by the province and Cal OES, as well as other coolers.
Cal OES also facilitated the distribution of 88 additional cool trailers, ten of which were designed to serve as temporary mortuaries and were sent to the provinces of LA, Imperial, Sonoma, San Bernardino and Monterey, according to a statement from the office.
These resources can help ensure that we do not get huge backups, or, if we have backups, it is handled [with] respect and dignity [and] that we have the necessary equipment or materials needed for coroners and medical examiners to deal with the deceased effectively, ”said Mark Ghilarducci, director of Cal OES, in a statement.
The state’s action is the latest in an effort to alleviate pressure on hospital mortuaries and private mortuaries that no longer have storage space for the bodies of COVID-19 victims.
Officials said last week that the California National Guard has been called in to help farm workers as bodies from hospitals’ morgues are stored in the LA County Department of the Medical Investigator Mortuary.
More than 28,000 Californians were killed in COVID-19 throughout the pandemic – and the toll is rising fast.
The state has averaged 368 deaths a day in the past week, a 45% increase from two weeks ago, according to data compiled by The Times.
Since Christmas, nearly 4,600 people across the country have died from COVID-19.
LA County was particularly hard hit. The province’s 11,500 plus coronavirus-related deaths make up 40% of California’s total, although the province makes up only a quarter of the state’s population.
The second-largest death toll is 2,189 from Riverside County. During the past week, an average of 204 people die every day from COVID-19 in the country.
LA County on Thursday recorded its fourth highest number of new cases of coronavirus, with 18,764, according to a Times Census of local health jurisdictions. This is well above the daily average of about 14,000 over the past week.
California on Thursday posted just under 40,000 new cases of coronavirus, continuing a trend over the past week that shows the country’s daily total flattening around the level. This is slightly less than the peak in mid-December, when California reported as many as 45,000 new cases a day.
However, officials have warned that the rate is still far too high to provide any real relief.
“I do not believe this is a new plateau that will automatically descend,” LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said Thursday. ‘In fact, I believe it’s just a pause before a new climax is produced by the evidence we see of too much movement taking place around Christmas and New Year. So hold on, because things can get worse. ”
About one in five coronavirus tests performed daily in LA County comes back positive, an astonishing rate that highlights how many people are infected and contagious.
“We have the power to get this virus under control if we choose to do so, and it is up to us,” Dr Christina Ghaly, director of health services in the country, said this week.
But the worst, as Garcetti predicted, is likely to lie ahead. Most people in COVID-19’s hospitals in LA County were infected before Christmas. It will only become clear next week, according to experts, how much worse the boom could be after the holidays.
At this point, officials and experts say the best way to protect Californians from the coronavirus is to stay home as much as possible. If you do dare, it is important to cover a face and keep physical distance from those outside your household, the authority emphasizes.
Ferrer said that “we cannot stress enough that at this stage we must find our way to change the path we are working on.”
‘There really is no way forward to help our hospitals unless we get the case numbers lower. There just isn’t, ”she said. “Large numbers are automatically translated into a large number of people in need of hospital care.”
Times authors Iris Lee and Lila Seidman contributed to this report.