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For the 20th day in a row, there were virtually no vacant intensive care beds available in much of California as hospitals scrambled to treat wave after wave of new COVID-19 patients.
“This push has been relentless,” Santa Clara County COVID-19 director Dr Ahmad Kamal said during a press briefing Wednesday. “It puts a strain on our health care system.”
The availability of intensive care beds in the Bay Area rose slightly on Wednesday to 7.4%, but the overall picture across the state looked grim. Capacity remained at 0% in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, the two hardest-hit areas.
A record 21,922 people were hospitalized with a confirmed case of COVID-19 in California on Wednesday, according to data compiled by The Chronicle. Almost 4,700 of these patients were in intensive care units.
There have been 503 new deaths from COVID-19 – well above the two-week daily average of just under 300 deaths per day.
The total number of confirmed cases in California has increased by 43,907, pushing the state to more than 2.5 million confirmed infections since the start of the pandemic.
Health officials have urged residents to stay at home, mask themselves and avoid frivolous 911 calls due to unprecedented pressure on hospitals and emergency medical systems.
“The ER is full,” said Dr. Jeffrey Chien, director of the emergency department at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose. “People are waiting for beds – we are very creative with the places to sit patients.”
The terrible warning came after some Santa Clara County hospitals reported waits of up to seven hours to put patients in beds.
Before Thanksgiving, the county had an average of five cases per 100,000 people. Now it’s 50 per 100,000, according to Dr Kamal, the county’s COVID-19 director.
“It’s 10 times worse than what we had before,” he said. “As horrible as it is, it can get worse.”
Hospital epidemic
The press briefing came as it emerged that nearly 10% of emergency room staff at one hospital in Gilroy had tested positive for coronavirus, the second outbreak to hit South Bay hospitals in recent weeks.
Eight of some 80 emergency department staff at St. Louis Regional Hospital contracted the coronavirus last week, Joy Alexiou, public information manager for the valley health and hospital system, said on Wednesday. of Santa Clara.
The infected staff are in quarantine and none required hospitalization.
Santa Clara County Legal Counsel James Williams said he expects the state to extend the regional stay-at-home order for the Bay Area, which is expected to expire on Friday.
The order has already been extended in the Southern California and San Joaquin Valley areas.
“We have all indications that it will be expanded here in the Bay Area as the situation at the hospital has not improved since its publication,” said Williams.
Terrible milestone
The situation in the Southern California area was even more dire, with public health data showing more than 1,000 Los Angeles County residents died from COVID-19 in the past week.
“LA County has reached the terrible milestone of more than 11,000 deaths from COVID-19,” Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said in a statement Wednesday. “As a community, we must make a commitment to stop the spread of COVID-19 in its tracks so that we can save as many lives as possible.”
Los Angeles County health officials have ordered ambulance teams not to transport low-survival patients to hospitals and to conserve oxygen use.
California has assigned more than 1,420 additional medical staff across the state in an effort to ease pressure on hospitals facing the spike in new cases and hospitalizations.
The program is managed by the State Emergency Services Office and includes members of the National Guard, emergency responders and more than 800 contractors.
Vaccination delays
The staggering number of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths come as vaccines continue to spread. According to state data, less than a third of available vaccine doses have been administered in California so far.
As of Tuesday, 459,564 of the 1,762,900 attributed to California had been administered, covering about 1.5% of the state’s entire adult population.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told a press briefing on Wednesday that states should not allow priority recommendations to hinder vaccine distribution. He said states like California should open up vaccination to the elderly and vulnerable groups.
“By all means, you want to open up to people 70 and over, or 65 and over,” Azar said.
Drugstore chains CVS and Walgreens said Wednesday they plan to complete the first round of vaccinations at skilled nursing facilities by January 25.
In a statement, CVS Health CEO Larry J. Merlo said the company is in talks with several states to make a limited number of doses available in the coming weeks at its CVS Pharmacy branches ahead of the wider rollout.
Variants of spreads
Concern continued to grow around a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus that was discovered in California.
Twenty-four new cases of a mutated strain of SARS-CoV-2, known as “B117” and first identified in the UK in December, were discovered in San Diego County on Tuesday.
Of the 24 newly confirmed patients, four are children under the age of 10. Those infected are believed to have no travel history and come from 19 different households, county officials said.
“The fact that these cases have been identified in multiple parts of the region shows that this strain of the virus could spread quickly,” said Wilma Wooten, San Diego County public health official.
Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday canceled his daily COVID-19 update in response to events at the U.S. Capitol, where protesters stormed the building during the Congressional presidential confirmation process.
Earlier today, Newsom called for stimulus payments of $ 600 to low-income Californians. With less than a month before California landlords can resume evicting tenants who have not paid their rent, he also said he would support extending the moratorium on partial evictions in the state.
Aidin Vaziri is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]
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