CALIFORNIA REPORTS RECORD VIRUS DEATHS
State is nation’s new epicenter for surging infections
California — the country’s largest and richest state — is the new epicenter of America’s coronavirus crisis, with surges of seriously infected patients threatening to overwhelm hospitals and overf low morgues.
The state is reporting unnerving numbers: California has set nationwide records for new cases again and again in the past week — most recently on Wednesday, when it posted more than 50,000 infections and 293 deaths. If California were a country, it would be among the world leaders in new COVID-19 cases, ahead of India, Germany and Britain.
Southern California and the state’s Central Valley — regions that together include 23 counties and most of the state’s nearly 40 million residents — had exhausted their regular supply of intensive care beds and many hospitals were tapping into their “surge” capacity. In Southern California, ICU capacity dipped to just 0.5 percent Wednesday.
“I want to be very clear: our hospitals are under siege and our model shows no end in sight,” Christina Ghaly, director of L.A. County’s Department of Health Services, said at a news briefing Wednesday.
Because it takes, on average, more than a week for people to get sick enough to be hospitalized, today’s capacity numbers actually ref lect case numbers that are roughly 10 days old, when the state was reporting 10,000 fewer infections.
“The worst,” Ghaly promised, “is still before us.”
California has seen coronavirus cases and hospitalizations soar in recent weeks. Hospitals are filling up so fast that officials are
rolling out mobile field facilities and scrambling to hire doctors and nurses, while the state is distributing 5,000 body bags mostly to the hard-hit Los Angeles and San Diego areas and has 60 refrigerated trailers standing by as makeshift morgues.
California is averaging more than 35,000 newly reported coronavirus cases a day. Health officials estimate 12 percent of them — 4,200 — end up in hospitals.
The record tally of cases reported Wednesday included 12,630 older cases that were added because of a new data collection method, according to the state Department of Public Health. But even without those, the daily total was the most during the pandemic.
Hospitalizations are now are nearly 15,000 and California now is averaging 177 deaths per day.
The crushing caseload is taking its toll on health care workers. Hospitals are scouring for space to add more beds but they also need to staff those beds, and many doctors, nurses, housekeepers and others are already working extra shifts.
“There’s so much stress on us,” said Dr. Mohamed Fayed, critical care specialist at UCSF in Fresno. “Nurses and physicians and all the health care workers are really working so hard through this, hours and hours and hours and hours per day nonstop.”
On Wednesday, California announced the San Francisco Bay Area would join three of the state’s five regions already under a state-mandated stay-athome order as ICU available beds dropped below 15 percent. The regions of greater Sacramento, the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California are already under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order, which closes businesses including hair and nail salons and movie theaters and severely limits retail operations.
The Northern California region, which includes Humboldt, Lake and Mendocino counties, is not affected for now.
Many of the Bay Area’s counties had already applied the order as a precaution and those that hadn’t must now do so today.
In Santa Clara County, which had already applied
the shutdown rules, infections are topping 1,000 per day, compared with 300 in July, said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, the county’s testing director.
“We’re not anywhere out of the woods yet,“he said.
In Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the country, Ghaly outlined what the public should expect during this most urgent moment, with hospitals stretched so thin. It will mean worse medical care across the board — for the patients with COVID-19 and without, who may have suffered a heart attack or gotten in a car accident, she said. There is only so much space and so many staff to care for everyone in need.
“All of this means,” Ghaly said, “that we will have an increase in deaths in the days and weeks to come.”
Barbara Ferrer, the director of the county’s public health department, said the rates of infection, hospitalization and death are all rising faster for Los Angeles’s Latino and Black residents than for White residents.