■ California hospitals resorted to overflow locations as virus cases surged.

Golden State reports 52,000 new COVID-19 cases in one day

LOS ANGELES — Hospitals across California have all but run out of intensive care beds for COVID-19 patients, ambulances are backing up outside emergency rooms, and tents for triaging the sick are going up as the nation’s most populous state emerges as the latest epicenter of the U.S. outbreak.

On Thursday, California reported 52,000 new cases in a single day — equal to what the entire U.S. was averaging in mid-october — and a one-day record of 379 deaths. More than 16,000 people are in the hospital with the coronavirus across the state, more than triple the number a month ago.

“I’ve seen more deaths in the last nine months in my ICU than I have in my entire 20-year career,” said Amy Arlund, a nurse at Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center.

While the surging virus has pushed hospitals elsewhere around the country to the breaking point in recent weeks, the crisis is deepening with alarming speed in California, even as the nationwide rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations this week and the impending release of a second vaccine have boosted hopes of defeating the scourge.

Intensive care unit capacity is at less than 1 percent in many California counties, and morgue space is running out, in what is increasingly resembling the disaster last spring in New York City.

Patients are being cared for at several overflow locations, including a former NBA arena in Sacramento, a former prison and a college gymnasium. Standby sites include a vacant Sears building in Riverside County.

At St. Mary Medical Center in Southern California’s Apple Valley, patients are triaged outside in tents, and the hospital put up temporary walls in its lobby to make more room to treat those with COVID-19. Patients are being treated in the halls on gurneys or chairs, sometimes for days, because there is nowhere else to put them, said Randall Castillo, the hospital’s chief executive.

Dr. Nasim Afsar, chief operating officer at UCI Health in Orange County, described an unrelenting churn of patients, many of them left to wait in the ER until a bed elsewhere in the hospital opens up.

“Every day we work through and we discharge the appropriate number of people, and by the next day, all of those beds are again filled up,” she said.

Dr. Denise Whitfield, an emergency room physician at Harbor-ucla Medical Center, said ambulance crews are left waiting around for patients to be seen.

“Over the last nine months that we’ve been dealing with this COVID pandemic, I can say that it’s been the worst that I’ve seen things in terms of looking at our capacity to care for our patients,” she said.

The virus has killed more than 300,000 Americans, and the nation is averaging over 2,500 deaths and more than 215,000 new cases per day. Nationwide the number of patients in the hospital with COVID-19 has climbed to an alltime high of more than 113,000.

Around the country, other hospitals are likewise parking patients in ERS because they have run out of ICU beds and also moving adults into pediatric hospitals and bringing in staff from out of state to treat the sick in makeshift wards.