Despite hospital overflows of patients, heartbreaking deaths and COVID-19 infection rates hanging at dangerous levels, there are some signs that the daily increase in the number of cases of coronavirus in California is starting to flatten.
It can take a few more days or weeks to be assured of the trend – and the flattening can be reversed as people further facilitate wearing the mask and social distance. But a number of government officials and local officials are cautiously optimistic that the unbridled, exponential exacerbation of the pandemic is slowing down.
Government Gavin Newsom described the flattened numbers as “light at the end of the tunnel”, adding that the coronavirus positivity rate and the number of people in hospitals and intensive care units with COVID-19 has decreased.
“We saw some encouraging signs,” Newsom said. ‘But now, more than ever before, it is we who must not watch, let go of our masks and make sure that we do everything in our power to maintain the purposefulness of the discipline to once again go through a others to work. boom. ”
The rate at which coronavirus test results are returning positively has begun to decline.
(Los Angeles Times)
Even in the severely hit Los Angeles County, there was talk Friday that the crisis might not get worse, at least for now. But conditions in hospitals are so dire that officials say there is little to celebrate, and there are still concerns that things could get worse quickly.
‘It’s hard to one day know what to make of a hump [and] another day a little lower, “said Dr. Paul Simon, chief scientific officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.” I’m hopeful that we’re flat. We’m unhappy at a lot, a lot high level. … This is too high a level of community distribution. ‘
In LA County, the average daily number of coronavirus cases during a week climbed to one of its highest numbers in the pandemic – up to 15,102 for the seven-day period that ended Wednesday. But by Friday night, the province was averaging about 14,600 cases a week for a week. On Friday, a Times count found 14,557 cases reported in LA County.
California hit one of its worst average daily new coronavirus cases on Sunday – nearly 45,000 cases a day, the second-highest number in the pandemic. But since then, the number has stopped rising, drifting between 41,000 and 44,000 cases a day.
The last time California recorded a record number of COVID-19 patients admitted to the hospital was on January 6, and it was 21,936. The last record number for the largest number of COVID-19 ICU patients was on Sunday, with 4,868 in the ICU.
By Thursday, there were 20,998 people with COVID-19 in hospitals in California, including 4,745 in the ICU.
Dr Mark Ghaly, the secretary of health and human services, said in an interview this week that the recent relative improvements in the pandemic trends are a sign that the local stay-at-home orders that were launched about six weeks ago have been introduced. work.
“Nothing is assured that there will still be a significant boom in the coming weeks, but there is a bit more optimism that the recent boom is ‘blunted’ compared to what we were aiming for,” Ghaly said.
But this can only be a brief highlight as officials express concern about a more contagious variant of the coronavirus, first identified in Britain in September, which is expected to spread more widely in California and quickly dominate the dominant variety in March. can be.
Preliminary studies indicate that it is about 50% more transmissible than the usual variety, and if more people become infected, hospitalizations will worsen and more people will die. It has already been identified in the provinces of San Diego and San Bernardino.
“We are very concerned about this variant because we have seen what happened in England, where it was a relatively rare source of infection in the early autumn to … the predominant tribe in south east England,” Simon said.
LA province officials on Friday did not release any additional information as to whether they would issue new orders to promote the spread of the disease. The institutions that could be further investigated include outdoor gyms, which are allowed to open 50%, and indoor shopping malls, which are supposed to keep only 20% open, Mayor Eric Garcetti said on Thursday night.
Simon acknowledged that the public was exhausted by the fight against the pandemic. And ‘we’ve seen over the last few months that there is less compliance with our restrictions. … We can apply additional restrictions, but unless they are met, it will not have the desired impact. ‘
‘I think our biggest hope, to be honest, is to roll out this vaccine as soon as possible. We are working hard on that and to continue to urge people to abide by our restrictions as much as possible, ”he said.
Even if people can’t meet all the restrictions all the time, Simon said he urges people to stick to it as much as possible. The official guidance in LA County, for example, is a ban on gatherings among people outside your household. But he also said it was a safe activity to go for a walk outside with some friends who also stayed at home – while all wearing masks and keeping physically far away from each other.
“We just do not want you to come together in large groups,” he said. ‘We do recognize the pain of social isolation that has just been overwhelming. … We appeal to people to hang in there. I think we are moving in a favorable way with the vaccine. ‘
The fact that the vaccines are 95% effective, according to Simon, “is almost like a miracle.”
California’s daily death toll remains extraordinarily high. On Friday, the state reported a record number of COVID-19 deaths in a single day – 700, according to a version of health areas conducted by The Times, which reached the record of 685 on January 8th.
California currently calculates an average of 536 deaths per day over the past week, which is a record and roughly equivalent to one death every three minutes. Nearly 33,000 Californians with COVID-19 died in this pandemic.
LA County reported 260 deaths Friday. The country has averaged 233 deaths per day over the past week, one of the highest such numbers of the pandemic.
Hospitals in Southern California continue to struggle with appalling overcrowding. In Los Angeles County, hospitals’ morgues are so full that 16 members of the California National Guard have been called in to help store corpses while funeral homes and mortuaries work through a backlog. The LA County coroner’s detained about 150 bodies among people who died from COVID-19 as of Tuesday.
Riverside County has also acquired extra storage space to store pickups – ten refrigerated trailers, of which eight can store 50 pickup trucks per trailer.
There are complex reasons for delays. Sometimes families take longer to make decisions ‘because they hope they might be able to wait a bit and maybe get together, bring in family,’ says Shane Reichardt, spokeswoman for the Riverside County Emergency Management Department. . ‘There are financial concerns. … People are struggling financially for several reasons, many of which are COVID related. ”
There were so many people with COVID-19 in the 17 Riverside County hospitals that 133% of the province’s licensed ICU beds were occupied earlier this week. This means that hospitals are forced to convert hospital beds that are not normally used for critically ill patients, and to adapt them again to accommodate ICU patients.
“Some hospitals do things like convert conference rooms … into patient areas,” Reichardt said.
Efforts are underway to convert a 65-bed outpatient surgery center at Riverside University Health System Medical Center, the country’s public hospital, to increase the ICU and the ability to deliver high-quality medical care . And at Riverside Community Hospital, efforts are being made to re-establish an area available for future expansion of the emergency department for critically ill patients.
Hospitals in Orange County were so busy this week that the Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center activated its 25-bed mobile bed hospital provided by the state. Jennifer Bayer, a spokeswoman for Tenet Healthcare, which runs both hospitals, as well as Lakewood Regional Medical Center and Placentia-Linda Hospital, has set up another in Los Alamitos Medical Center but has not yet used it.
But just the last few days, hospital officials have noticed a slight increase in hospitalizations. “It does not climb. It holds, ” Bayer said. “We hope it decreases – I think it’s too early to say. It was actually just the last few days. ‘
Times staff writer Iris Lee contributed to this report.