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As parts of northern California began to see the first signs of progress kept on Tuesday in the battle against the winter coronavirus outbreak, hard-hit Southern California communities braced for more cases to invade hospitals already. overwhelmed as COVID-19 continues to rise.
The post-Christmas wave is still slamming Los Angeles and surrounding counties. The spread is increasing again as people infected over the holidays test positive. Officials expect this to lead to more hospitalizations, but how many remains a critical question as the medical infrastructure is already at the breaking point.
Any new spike in infections, officials warn, will trigger a resulting wave of new patients requiring professional care – creating a unbearable strain on hospitals and intensive care units already overtaxed.
On Tuesday, a tally from local health jurisdictions revealed 318 reported deaths in LA County, tying the single-day death record on Friday.
Daily cases of coronavirus are also increasing. As of Tuesday, 14,134 new cases of the coronavirus were recorded in LA County. That pushed the county average to over 15,000 cases per day over the past week, one of the worst daily averages on record in LA County and a harbinger of a future increase in hospitalizations.
Officials had predicted that an average of 15,000 cases per day would likely be a precursor to an even worse increase in hospitalizations. So far, that has not materialized, but officials expect that to change soon.
But in the north, the news was not so dire.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Tuesday that the state is immediately lifting its stay-at-home order for Greater Sacramento, making the region the first to lift restrictions on businesses and activities imposed in hopes of mitigating the outbreak coronaviruses.
The counties included in the region – Alpine, Amador, Butte, Colusa, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, Sierra, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba – will revert to the state color-coded level framework that determines the level. marketing and public spaces can reopen.
“California remains in its most intense wave to date,” Newsom said in a short video message announcing the move. “But there are good things to report. We are starting to see some stabilization in both the ICUs [and] in our positivity rate. We’re also starting to see the rate of growth in hospitalizations starting to decline. “
As of Tuesday, Greater Sacramento had more than 9% of its intensive care beds and is expected to have at least 15% available capacity in four weeks – the criteria for leaving the stay-at-home order. The move will allow counties to allow barbershops and barber shops to reopen in limited capacity and allow other businesses, including restaurants, to resume some outdoor activities.
San Francisco also had encouraging data. Dr Grant Colfax, director of public health for San Francisco, said while coronavirus cases rose 70% after Thanksgiving, they have only risen by 28% since Christmas and New Years.
“The rate of increase is not as severe as it was after Thanksgiving,” the mayor of London Breed said at a press conference on Tuesday. “This is good news.”
But the Bay Area continues with stay-at-home rules as the available capacity of intensive care units in the area is still critical – at less than 5%.
For example, in Santa Clara County, conditions in hospitals are still tense. Mortues at three hospitals are at full capacity and four others are nearing full capacity, said Dr Ahmad Kamal, the county’s director of health preparedness.
In fact, there are so many COVID-19 patients in hospitals in Silicon Valley that they have effectively kicked the non-COVID patients out of the ICU, Kamal said.
“This means that either their care is deferred or they are paid for at a lower level of care than one would ideally want,” Kamal said. The consequences of postponing significant medical care will become apparent in the months and years to come, “because these people are going to get sicker and their needs will increase.”
But on the bright side, as hospitalizations continue to worsen, the increase is “not as rapid” as it used to be, Kamal said.
Statewide, officials said there was initial evidence that the Christmas peak was not as bad as the Thanksgiving peak.
The number of coronavirus positive patients hospitalized throughout California peaked at just under 22,000, and new COVID-19 admissions have also declined – from around 3,500 new hospital patients per day last week to between 2,500 and 2,600, according to health secretary Dr Mark Ghaly and California Social Services.
Although the number of cases may be skewed by the number of people tested and when those results are reported, he said on Tuesday that “the hospital numbers don’t lie.”
“People come to the hospital, they get the care they need when they need it because they are so sick,” he said in a briefing. “And so to see a reduction in our number of hospitals last week to 10 days, in terms of the rate of increase, I think that’s a very encouraging sign. But we did not get out of the woods. We know there is still a lot of COVID in our communities, that people can easily pass it on.
It also doesn’t mean a drop is imminent, said Ghaly: “We are preparing and anticipating that an increase in hospitalizations will occur in the middle of the month.
“We just hope it’s not as big as we expected and certainly not as big as it would have been if we hadn’t seen these drivetrain reductions, in part because of this regional order to stay at home, ”he said. , referring to additional restrictions on businesses and activities imposed on specific parts of the state when the available capacity in their ICUs falls below 15%.
California on Tuesday released a high number of coronavirus cases and deaths in a single day – well above the daily average. A daily investigation by The Times found 53,260 cases of coronavirus – the sixth highest for a day – and 678 deaths reported on Tuesday. The death toll was the second-highest of all days in the pandemic, eclipsed only by Friday’s tally, when 685 deaths were recorded.
Tuesday marked the first time that California has passed the record mark of an average of more than 500 COVID-19 deaths per day over a weekly period. A Times analysis found that California currently records an average of 520 deaths per day, roughly the equivalent of a Californian who dies every three minutes.
In Southern California, officials warn the worst may yet be to come. Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley were still at 0% of available intensive care capacity on Tuesday.
Besides Los Angeles County, the Inland Empire was hit by the outbreak, with hospitals teeming with patients. Even the northwestern coastal counties – San Luis Obispo, Ventura and Santa Barbara – have seen an alarming increase in cases over the past week.
LA County recorded a cumulative total of 947,035 coronavirus cases on Tuesday and 12,706 cumulative deaths from COVID-19. That’s more than 40% of the 31,000 cumulative COVID-19 deaths in California, even though LA County represents about a quarter of the state’s population.
More than 2,300 people in the county have died from COVID-19 since New Years Day, and LA County has averaged about 231 COVID-19 deaths per day over the past week, a higher rate than at any other time during the pandemic.
Although the number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized across the county has stabilized at just under 8,000, the sustained increase has forced some county hospitals to set up beds in hallways and even in gift shops and making certain patients wait in ambulances until 5 p.m. before the emergency room opens.
Hospital mortuaries are so overcrowded in LA County that the National Guard helped county workers store the bodies at the coroner’s office, where refrigerated containers were brought to four times the capacity, until the funeral homes and mortuaries can accommodate the backlog. Some hospitals have had to declare internal disasters and temporarily close their doors to all incoming ambulances due to staff issues or dysfunctional oxygen supply systems, essential for breathless COVID-19 patients.
Los Angeles sees “signs of this deadly surge continuing, even though the number of hospital patients across the county has stabilized for now,” said Dr Christina Ghaly, director of health services for the County of Los Angeles on Monday. THE.
“We are monitoring the data very carefully over the next two days as this is when we expect to start seeing an increase in the number of patients from the recent Christmas and New Year holidays,” he said. she declared.
Lin and Dolan reported from San Francisco, Money from Long Beach. Times Editors Sandhya Kambhampati, Swetha Kannan, Ryan Menezes and Andrea Roberson contributed to this report.
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