As COVID-19 increases, Los Angeles County hospitals run out of hospital beds, ICU space

LOS ANGELES (KABC) – Faced with a further surge in coronavirus cases, Los Angeles County hospitals may run out of available beds in the next two to three weeks, county health officials say.

ICU beds could run out even sooner.

County Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer is urging hospitals to begin implementing their plans to prepare for a surge.

“If the trajectory continues, the number of beds in the ICU, our most limited resource, is likely to be inadequate in the near future,” Ferrer wrote in a letter to hospital executives.

Plans for augmentation include putting elective surgeries and other services on hold; prepare non-traditional areas such as operating rooms and waiting rooms to store hospital beds; and ensure that facilities have additional supplies of personal protective equipment on hand.

New projections from the county’s predictive modeling team warn that the trajectory of the epidemic is changing for the worse.

That means that about 1 in 140 Los Angeles County residents are currently infectious to others, compared to about 1 in 400 the previous week.

“A typical busy large store is likely to have multiple infectious people coming in and shopping every day,” writes the predictive modeling team.

One of the most positive developments in the otherwise alarming trend is that clinicians have learned more about caring for patients with COVID-19 so that they avoid putting them on ventilators or putting them in the ICU. That has made more of those beds and equipment available than would have been expected with the level of medical care at the start of the pandemic.