According to 2018 data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, California, the richest and most populous state in the world, has long had a shortage of hospital beds – only 1.8 beds per 1000 people. There are now record-breaking cases of coronavirus in many parts of the state with the capacity of the intensive care unit being abolished.
એર Ariana Drehsler for the New York Times
Gabriela Ortega, a respiratory therapist, talks to a health care worker who is helping treat a Covid-19 patient at Providence St. Mary’s Medical Center in Apple Valley, California, on December 17.
Southern California, its most populous region, and San Joaquin Valley, a Madhya Pradesh, have a percentage of ICUs that keep them under stay-at-home order until at least Dec. 28, the California Department of Public Health said Saturday.
Intensive care units in the Bay Area are at 11.3 percent capacity and in the Greater Sacramento area at 16.9 percent. Both will be under order at least until the new year.
Prior to the epidemic, the ratio of hospital beds per capita in California was slightly higher than in Washington State and Reg Reagan, which ranked last in both countries. Many hospitals in the state kept the number of their beds low to limit costs.
ICU beds have also been limited: according to KFF’s 2018 figures, California had only 2.1 beds per 10,000 people, according to KFF’s 2018 figures, just 10 more than any other state.
California is the first state in the US to have more than 2 million cases of coronavirus so far. On Friday, the state’s weekly average of new cases per day, 36,18 was New, according to the New York Times database. That’s up 21 percent from the previous two weeks.
The situation is now out of control, officials and health care workers have warned. At Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in South Los Angeles, resources are so vast that Girney has been placed in a gift shop and the lobby is being used to treat patients. And having adequate staff for healthcare facilities is yet another hurdle.
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