Dr Nicole Van Groningen is exhausted. A hospitalist and assistant professor at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Van Groningen, has been at the forefront of the fight against Covid-19 for 11 months, and because LA amounts to the worst increase in cases since the pandemic began. wanted, she wanted to spend the last two weeks of January in the hospital’s overwhelming intensive care unit. Even though the cases were flat, the morale is dark.
‘Everyone is on point, it’s a feeling of constantly strengthening ourselves to make things worse. And the patients at the ICU have been so ill for so long, ‘she says slightly. It is the end of January and the area is averaging more than 40,000 cases per week. The hospital treatment unit has a maximum capacity of 33 percent. “They are getting worse, and they are not bouncing back as we usually see. We are used to the skills we can use to make most people better. We know we are doing everything we can, but it takes a psychological toll if we cannot cure these people. ”
Dr. Van Groningen’s description of the fight against Covid is frightening. Patients come in scared and anxiously waiting to see if their symptoms eventually go away, or if they will increase enough to go to the ICU, where the chances of survival are much lower. “Our patients come in terrified. They are really scared when they first get to the hospital when they are struggling to breathe. We get it better after we get oxygen, ‘she says. “Sometimes, even with that, they start to progress and they become short of breath again. Once you take them to the ICU, it is palpable how scared they are. ‘
A few kilometers away, the deadly toll of the virus is barely visible. A few days before my conversation with dr. From Gronigen, I parked near the entrance to Runyon Canyon Park, a popular hiking trail overlooking the city from the Hollywood Hills. It is quiet, even quiet. A couple of teenagers get out of a Jeep, unmask and stand next to each other as they get ready to start on the trail. If there is such a thing as a sense of normalcy during the devastating Covid-19 health crisis, this is the case.
Across the country, the pandemic has exposed a profound divide in our communities, with black and Latin populations contracting the disease and dying at twice as many as white people. according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nowhere is this more evident than in Los Angeles, where, depending on the zip code, the most recent outbreak of coronavirus outbreaks has been a bit of a talking point during Zoom calls – something to wait until dinner and holidays pick up again – or the cruel plague that destroyed families and communities. Ten of the richest neighborhoods in Los Angeles County combined, representing about 323,000 people, have about 700 less confirmed cases of coronavirus if only the city of Compton (95,000 people) alone.
This is far from being a coincidence. The richer, whiter cities are sparsely populated, have less overcrowding and have more residents who can work from home and drive, which is essential for infection rates. Meanwhile, those in arms communities rely more on public transportation and are forced to leave their homes to work and bring the virus back to their families. After a brutal two months of infections and deaths during the holiday season, Los Angeles is recovering, with confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths falling from their heights in late December and early January. But as the city slowly returns, the disproportionate toll is clear.
Seeing the daily Covid statistics and hearing anecdotes of horror at the front lines of the ICUs is disturbing. While a LA resident died every 10 minutes due to the virus during the height of the boom, residents were still able to laze at shopping malls for the holidays. Restoration of safer home management in Los Angeles County only began three days after Black Friday. As the cases skyrocketed, the province took precautionary measures, eating away at the end of November and closing down outside businesses, such as hair salons, and residents were told to leave the house if it was not necessary. Yet Los Angeles never again entered an exclusion.
Christopher Prado, EMT, left, and Jesse Lynwood, ED RN, right, work on April 23, 2020 with a suspected Covid-19 patient in the emergency department in Martin Luther King, Jr., community hospital in the Willowbrook neighborhood . Los Angeles, CA.
Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images
A stark contrast to the beginning of the quarantine, where traffic did not yet exist and the city seemed empty, during the deadliest period of LA, shopping malls, jewelry stores, bookstores and most other types of retail businesses were open at limited capacity . According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the city and state also had to support a significantly wounded economy, with California having the third-highest unemployment rate in the country in December, and they were constantly under pressure from businesses that had been strained for months. wash. Restaurants across the state have sued California Govin Newsom over eating restrictions, and Newsom faces a small but conspicuous face. recall attempt of California Republicans in light of the state’s response to the virus.
Openings with limited capacity only added a further sense of normality, and what came out of it was a confusing message to Angelinos about what was expected and what was allowed.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in south Los Angeles is surrounded by black and Latino neighborhoods like Watts, best known for the 1965 Watts riots, and it has become a symbol of how coronavirus is exorbitant in communities. hit. The relatively small hospital with 131 beds has been very overcrowded since December, and according to dr. MLKCH CEO Elaine Batchlor said her hospital served more Covid-positive patients than hospitals. Although the increase dropped significantly in February, hospital treatment remains 100 percent full.
The community serving MLKCH was very vulnerable to a pandemic. Access to health care is more restricted, and underlying health conditions are more prevalent. Diabetes, for example, is one of the biggest risk groups for serious cases of Covid, and Southern LA has three times higher diabetes than any other part of the state, Batchlor says, and diabetic amputations and wounds are the first surgery in the hospital. ‘Many of our patients are at the forefront, and if it keeps spreading and is exposed to it at the point, they live in crowded house, they go home and give it to the rest of the family. We see whole families getting sick and losing important members of the family. ”
The hospital set up its gift shop to treat more patients, doubled rooms, converted an entire floor as a critical care unit and erected five three-tent tents outside the hospital, where patients are treated and climbed until there is space inside the hospital.
As Batchlor says, the neighborhoods serving her hospital have long been probably the biggest challenge to any health emergency, and she hopes the pandemic will highlight the need for better resources to poor communities across the country in the future. ‘Even before Covid came, we had a public health crisis in our community, and it’s an epidemic of poorly treated chronic diseases. [Covid] then bred a vulnerable population and hit them much harder than any other, ‘says Batchlor. ‘In the long run, we need to create better access and quality healthcare for sub-communities. We are all connected. I hope the pandemic has shown us that we are all suffering. ”
Batchlor and Van Groningen see both sides of Los Angeles’ Covid story every day. After treating the disease’s patients in the country, they return to their homes in Westchester and Santa Monica, where incomes are higher and cases lower. A few times, Batchlor would come home to see how her neighbors hold social events and do not accept the city’s mandate, something she says is ‘demoralizing’.
“It feels really frustrating and sad that people are not taking it seriously and are not willing to make the smaller sacrifices to keep other people in the community safe,” she says. ‘And it makes me angry when I think of how hard we work to treat people affected by covid. Earlier in the pandemic, when I saw people walking around without a mask, I would say something. I stopped because it only happened so many times. ”
From Groningen goes from and to the work that passes along the beach in Santa Monica, where especially on weekends, it is difficult to discern a difference in a continued world. Masklessness is not unbridled, but it’s still striking, she says, and she still sees that enough people from different households are likely to come too close for convenience. It is a difficult task to find a medium between issues that keep the economy and the deterioration of mental health in a pandemic for almost a year, as a pandemic. So many epidemiologists and health experts have the Los Angeles Times, fatigue and a decrease in social distancing practices were a common quote during the holiday period in cases. And yet Van Groningen is optimistic.
“I like to think we did not give up,” she says. “Through my experiences with friends and people I am close to, I want to say that most people are still trying to do the right thing. But there is a decoupling. I think people are sometimes confused about what the right thing is. ”