LOS ANGELES – Los Angeles County on Tuesday fueled the vaccination effort in its fight against the coronavirus. The opening of five large-scale vaccination sites is 75 smaller venues and the high-capacity center opened at Dodger Stadium. Officials in the province are also extending the testing to people aged 65 and older.
The openings come at a critical stage in the country’s fight against COVID-19, with the transmission rate remaining high and the number of cases and deaths continuing to increase. Hospitalizations have dropped slightly over the past week, but health officials still fear that the admissions to the medical center will have to come up again due to infections that occurred during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Over the weekend, the country confirmed the first local case of a variety of the virus first detected in the UK. This strain, known from B.1.1.7, is not considered more deadly, but it is much more contagious and easily passes from person to person with the potential to spread rapidly among the population.
On Monday night, officials at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center announced that they had identified another virus strain, known as CAL.20C, which was detected in more than one-third of the COVID-19 patients treated at the hospital. The strain was also found in about a quarter of the samples of COVID-19 patients across Southern California.
“The recent increase in COVID-19 positive cases in Southern California coincides with the rise of CAL.20C,” said Eric Vail, a physician and assistant professor of pathology and director of molecular pathology in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Cedars-Sinai. , reads a statement released Monday.
According to Cedars-Sinai officials, the CAL.20C strain is different from the British variant. It is still unclear whether the CAL.20C strain spreads faster, is lethal or is resistant to current virus treatments. But researchers from Cedars-Sinai said the tribe was partly responsible for the huge boom in cases the country has experienced over the past two months. Hospital officials said the strain was virtually non-existent in October, but by December it was 36.4 percent of the COVID-19 cases in Cedars-Sinai and 24 percent of the COVID-19 samples found in Southern California. collected.
According to Cedars-Sinai, the strain has also been detected in patients in Northern California, New York, Washington and abroad in Oceania.
Los Angeles County surpassed the $ 1 million mark in cumulative cases over the weekend. Although the milestone represents about one-tenth of the total population in the country, the modeling introduced last week estimated that as many as a third of the population is infected at some point, and many of them never know it. , but can still spread the virus. to others.
With at least 10 percent of COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization, the number of higher cases will translate into higher hospitalization numbers and eventually more deaths.
Rising deaths from the virus led to a grim move Sunday by South African air quality regulators, which lifted the cap on the number of bodies that could burn local crematoria. Cremations normally operate below a limit designed to reduce the effect of cremations on air quality.
The Board of Supervisors would meet Tuesday morning in a closed session to discuss a variety of topics. The board is expected to discuss possible new health restrictions last week, such as closing indoor shopping malls and other non-essential retail businesses, but did not act immediately. It was unclear whether the topic would be discussed at Tuesday’s meeting.
Meanwhile, the Department of Public Health is hosting a virtual town hall on Tuesday at 6pm to discuss the COVID-19 vaccine, how it was developed, where it will be distributed and when it will be made available to the general public. City Hall will be streamed live on the department’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages. People can also submit questions before the meeting.
The country reported another 88 deaths from COVID-19 and 9,927 new infections on Monday, noting that the numbers could be artificially low due to a backlog in weekend and holiday reporting from Martin Luther King Jr. Current hospitalizations in the province stood at 7,328 on Monday, provincial officials reported.
The new deaths, along with one reported by health officials in Pasadena, increased the province’s total death toll to 13,937. The new cases in Los Angeles County, along with 107 confirmed by Pasadena, have increased the cumulative number of cases confirmed in the country since the pandemic began to 1,024,297.
According to the state, there were 7,322 people in the hospital on Monday due to COVID-19, which continued a downward trend of the past week. Hospitalizations peaked in early January at more than 8,000, putting pressure on hospitals across the country, forcing ambulances to wait hours to drop off patients and asking medical centers to take patients to gift shops and cafeterias care for.
However, although the population of COVID-19 patients in the hospital is declining, the intensive care units remain crammed with virus patients. According to the state, there were 1,728 COVID-19 patients in ICUs in the province, which has approximately 2,500 licensed ICU beds.
Health officials have said in recent weeks that about two-thirds of the ICU patients in the country are being treated for COVID-19, which for other reasons leaves little room for people in need of ICU care.
Authorities have warned that while new hospital admissions may have looked up, the numbers could skyrocket as people infected during the Christmas and New Year holidays begin to develop symptoms and need medical attention.
The country announced an important milestone in its vaccination efforts on Monday. According to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, nearly 99 percent of the state’s competent nursing homes administered the first doses of the vaccine to residents and staff. The five remaining nursing homes will fire this week.
And late Monday, the chair of the Board of Supervisors, Hilda Solis, issued an order to make COVID-19 vaccines available to anyone aged 65 and over from Thursday – despite concerns from health officials about the dose delivery.
Solis’ decision was in line with guidelines released by Gavin Newsom last week. But this was contrary to the remarks of provincial health officials, who wanted to wait until the vaccinations of health workers in the front line were completed before offering limited vaccine supplies to a wider range of people.
Concerns about vaccines were raised late Sunday when the state epidemiologist warned suppliers to stop administering doses of a group of 330,000 Modern vaccines in response to allergic reactions suffered by a handful of people in San Diego .
The 330,000 doses of Moderna vaccine that are no longer available represent 10 percent of all vaccines received by the state so far. It dealt a blow to provinces like Los Angeles that called for more vaccines to be applied to keep up with demand.
The stock is so short that the operators of the vaccination clinic in Dodger Stadium warned over the weekend that their doses could run out on Wednesday.
The affected Moderna vaccines were distributed to 287 locations in California. It was unclear if any of these locations were in Los Angeles County.
Due to the strong wind, a COVID-19 vaccination center at Hansen Dam closed for the rest of the day on Tuesday, according to the city fire brigade. All vaccination appointments have been transferred to the Dodger Stadium vaccination site.
Visit the website for more information on the vaccination stages and to make an appointment.
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City News Service and Patch Editor Nicole Charky contributed to this report.