Los Angeles County is on the verge of becoming the epicenter of a coronavirus epidemic, a health official said Friday – a horrific announcement of the death toll from COVID-19 among people in California who have never seen it before.
While the worst wave of coronavirus has walled off the entire state, its impact is being felt especially in the country’s most populous country, where officials have warned that the healthcare system is already being dismantled.
The chief medical officer of Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, Dr. Brad Spielberg said, “I’m not going to sugarcoat this: we’re crushing.”
He said local hospitals were already “critically overcrowded”, and added that “LA County is now moving towards becoming an epidemic center.”
“We have not yet reached the stage at which other parts of the world, including the United States, are suffering catastrophic consequences. But we are moving in that direction, ”he said. “And if we don’t stop the spread, our hospitals will be flooded. If you have a heart attack, if you have a car accident, if you fall down the stairs or have a stroke, we cannot keep the bed for you. ”
For many, the top concern is the county’s intensive care units, which are needed for critically ill or critically injured patients.
Nov. More than 1,000 people with COVID-19 are now in the LA County ICU, more than quadrupling the number from 1.
The countywide has about 2,500 licensed ICU beds, and as of Friday, officials said only 69 of them were open and available.
Across Southern California, the state-defined swath, which includes LA and 10 other counties, ICU bed availability reached 0% on Thursday and remained there on Friday.
While that doesn’t mean no beds are available at all – as the state uses the formula emphatically to ensure that some ICU beds remain open to non-covid patients – it is still facing hospitals across the region. .
L.A. The county’s director of health services, Dr. According to Christina Ghali, “the system is in crisis.”
“When the load time of an ambulance is four hours, six hours, eight hours, it is a crisis. When the emergency departments of hospitals are overflowing, it is a crisis. It is a crisis when there are not enough beds available in the right staff ratio. “That’s really the point we’re at.”
Hospitals have several options to provide the highest level of care possible when an ICU is filled, including moving some patients who are usually in the intensive care unit to other areas of the hospital or keeping them in the emergency room longer than usual. .
Despite those strategies being in place, eventually there could be a lot of critically ill patients due to the limited number of ICU doctors and nurses available – resulting in patients not getting the care they need and, potentially, increasing mortality.
It is likely to be particularly chilling, as officials have said they fully expect the number of hospital admissions to continue to rise in the coming weeks.
Experts and officials say it takes two to three weeks for spikes to form in cases of coronavirus.
Two weeks ago, there were an average of 17,800 new coronavirus cases per day in California. Since then the average daily caseload has more than doubled.
The fear is that the meteorite surge in cases could provoke fresh waves of hospital admissions – exacerbating the health care crisis.
Already, statewide, the number of coronavirus-positive patients is very large, 16,019, and in ICU, 3,447, statewide.
“We have not yet seen the rate of hospital admissions,” Ga Wei said, referring to recent case counts. “Those patients are still reaching a stage where they may need hospital-level care, and that will put a strain on the entire healthcare system.”
State officials have previously estimated that 12% of newly diagnosed coronavirus cases are likely to be hospitalized, with 12% eventually ending up in the ICU.
As of early January, LA County may have 1,600 to 3,600 COVID-19 patients in need of ICU beds, according to forecasts if the trend of virus transmission remains the same.
Nevertheless, healthcare professionals have consistently respected their ability to care for the toughest COVID-19 patients in previous months – learning to avoid, when possible, putting them on a mechanical ventilator and using alternative methods to get more oxygen into the bloodstream; Putting people on their stomachs to make it easier to breathe; And giving patients steroid treatment, for example – officials and experts have long warned that the acute severity of death is an inevitable consequence of coronavirus infections and hospitalized snowballing across the state.
More California people are now dying from COVID-19 than at any other stage of the epidemic.
More than 1,500 people lost their lives in the past week – a staggering number representing about 7% of the state’s more than 22,000 coronavirus-related deaths.
The death toll seen on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – 295, 394 and 288, respectively – represents three fatal days observed during the entire epidemic in the state, according to data compiled by the Times.
“It’s not the flu. Governor Gavin News said this week that this is not something vague. “This is a deadly disease, a deadly epidemic.”
Officials are optimistic, however, that California is close to a possible turn. The first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine has arrived, and hundreds of thousands more are on the way.
Hundreds of LA county healthcare workers have received doses of the vaccine so far, and that number is expected to reach 1,500 by the end of Friday and about 6,000 by Christmas.
“Our goal is to vaccinate 10,000 employees by the end of the calendar year,” said Dr. S. K. Krishnan, associate chief medical officer at LA County Health Services. Said Paul Gibboni.
However, widespread inoculation is still months away, and given the ferocious and widespread coronavirus transmission at the time, officials say residents need to do everything possible to protect themselves and their loved ones in the meantime.
Yet healthcare workers and hospitals do everything possible to treat people infected with Covid-19, “We can only respond; “We can’t stop the spread,” Spell said.
“We need people to listen to these mitigation strategies to slow the spread or we’ll get out of bed,” he said.
This means wearing a mask in public, doing regular handwashing and staying home when you are sick. Perhaps most critically, officials say residents should keep physical distance, and avoid associating with those with whom they do not live.
While the last to ask could be a bridge too far for epidemic-fed Californians eager to spend the winter holidays with family and friends, officials say some of the seeds of today’s horrific boom were planted around Thanksgiving, while many traveled. Did or were exchanged together. Public health warnings.
Making the same kind of choice at this point, officials warn, will only increase in the long run – and potentially spoiled – increase.
“Now we’re learning a very painful lesson. Even though we want to get things back to normal, the virus is ruthless and will continue to spread, make people very sick and, sadly, kill people,” LA County said. Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a statement. “We can’t raise another holiday surge that will flood our already stressed hospitals and healthcare workers. We should all work together to prevent as many deaths as possible.”
Times staff writers Colin Shalby and Soumya Karlamangala contributed to this report.
