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In April, with California’s coronavirus rates among the lowest in the country, many of the state’s nurses flew to different parts of the United States to help with the pandemic. This Christmas, it is the Golden State hospitals that are desperate.
“You never really know if you’re going to be staffed,” said Valerie Ewald, who has been a nurse in the intensive care unit at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center for nearly 20 years.
“It’s a lot to call, cajole and beg,” he said. “It has hit us and all the hospitals in California. But the Los Angeles area is really taking a hit. “
California has the most daily new positive cases in the US: An average of more than 40,000 cases per day for the past week, with about 250 average daily deaths during that time. On December 23, it became the first US state to surpass 2 million known positive cases, with the second million cases occurring in the previous six weeks alone, up from 10 months for the first million.
The crisis is particularly acute in Southern California where, at the time of writing, ICU beds were not available. In Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, the death rate in the past seven days has averaged more than three per hour.
“It’s a viral tsunami,” said Robert Kim-Farley, professor of epidemiology at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health and a former senior official in the Los Angeles Department of Public Health. “It is much bigger than what we have experienced before this.”
The difference, he suggested, had been the combined effects of complacency, financial despair, and the onslaught of family-oriented holidays at the end of the year: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hannukah and Christmas.
While the number of new daily cases in the state is more than 20 times higher than when the lockdown orders were first enforced in April, Californians’ fear of the virus is considerably lower than at the time, according to the University of Southern California Center for Social and Economic Research, which conducts a biweekly survey that assesses attitudes toward the pandemic.
“People [in California] they have become less sensitive to rising case rates, less sensitive to risk than at the beginning of the pandemic, “said Kyla Thomas, a sociologist at the center, although she noted that researchers had observed the same pattern in most of the country.
Data from December 22 suggested that the average perceived probability of contracting coronavirus among Californians was 23 percent, while in April it had been 30 percent. The average perceived probability of dying from Covid-19 fell to 16 percent, down from 29 percent at the beginning of the year.
In Los Angeles County, the survey also suggested that nearly a third of those surveyed had visited a friend, neighbor, or relative in the past week, or had someone visit them.
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“If the survey is representative of Los Angeles County residents,” the health department said in a statement requesting adherence, “more than 3,000,000 residents are not following the safety guide that tells us not to meet with people outside of our home. immediate home “.
As California has sought to increase treatment capacity, nursing unions have resisted state efforts to relax the minimum requirements for the number of nurses per patient, a measure that doctors say would significantly worsen the quality of care. care and would put nurses at even greater risk. The California Nurses Association had held strikes against the measure and several hospitals reversed the planned changes.
More than 60,000 healthcare workers in the state have contracted Covid-19, according to the California Department of Public Health, with at least 240 deaths.
“The nurses stay together, always, and we are never afraid,” said Mendy Baxter, a Texas emergency room nurse who has been working in California since February, first in San Antonio and more recently in Salinas. The hospital where he works, Natividad Medical Center, has pitched tents outside the main building to care for the sick.
“It’s all we can do to keep our heads above water,” Ms. Baxter said. “The hospitals are full, the beds are full, there is nowhere to move patients once you enter them and start caring for them.”
According to Aya Healthcare, a leading national contractor for “travel nurses,” as of December 21 there were 4,390 open nursing positions in California, by far the largest number in the country. Nationally, the number of openings for “crisis” positions has increased by more than 90% in the last month. Compared to this time last year, the number of vacant nursing positions is almost 200% higher.
With the statewide availability of ICU beds at Christmas at just over 1 percent, California Governor Gavin Newsom has looked further, to countries like Taiwan and Australia, to find critical care nurses, based on the relationships created by his other 2020 crisis: wildfires.
Other measures by the governor have included emergency training, in just two days, to bring nurses from other disciplines to the ICU. This has raised even more concern among nursing groups, who argue that the staff shortage was a “manufactured crisis.” Hospitals have been accused of laying off nurses and cutting contractor salaries during the “quieter” months of the pandemic.
Heading into the new year, Mr. Newsom said during a news conference that vaccination efforts made him “enthusiastic that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but aware that we are still in the tunnel.” Just over 70,000 people in California, mostly healthcare workers, had received a coronavirus vaccine as of Dec. 21.
Much of the state will be under stay-at-home orders until 2021. To deter travelers, some popular getaway destinations have excluded tourists. In Tahoe, the northern California region that tends to be teeming with skiers at Christmas, local officials have placed additional restrictions on accommodations, urging short-term rental service Airbnb to inform guests of the stay-at-home order. Airbnb said it had informed the hosts of the guidelines, and any action or refunds were at the host’s discretion.
Among those who had to cancel their trip to Tahoe was Josh Larney, who lives in Oakland and works at WeWork. There were “definitely frustrations around the cancellation,” he said, “but that has been the story of 2020.”
