Victims change:
The coronavirus is showing more unpredicability, with a larger percentage of otherwise healthy people dying of COVID- 19.
The rampaging coronavirus is revealing new unpredictability as the promised postholiday surge continues, with some hospitals now seeing a rise in patients sick with COVID19 who had no underlying medical conditions, officials say.
Hospitals in the Bay Area and beyond are seeing an increase in such patients, Dr. Peter ChinHong, an infectious disease expert with UCSF, said Sunday.
“It’s not just people in nursing homes or people who are ill with immunocompromising conditions who are the ones getting sick,” ChinHong said. “With COVID, it’s an equal opportunity disease, in some sense.”
That lends more uncertainty to predicting who will become seriously ill.
Earlier in the pandemic, only 7% of COVID19 deaths in Los Angeles County occurred among people with no underlying medical conditions, while now, 14% of deaths are among that group, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Santa Clara County recorded its highest COVID19 death toll to date over the weekend — 40 lives lost to the virus were recorded Saturday — as case
numbers and deaths reached troubling new heights and health leaders braced for more weeks of tragic postholidaygathering outcomes.
Stanford University canceled plans to bring freshmen and sophomore students back to campus for winter quarter because of the worsening pandemic.
The Bay Area overall passed yet another depressing milestone Sunday, with more than 3,000 COVID19 deaths since
the start of the pandemic. More than 303,000 Bay Area residents had been infected as of Sunday. California surpassed 30,000 deaths on Sunday.
Overwhelmed hospitals across California continue struggling to find intensive care beds, while experts predict the surge will get even worse this month before possibly leveling out in February.
The Bay Area region’s hospital ICU capacity was at just 3% availability, based on Friday records, and the greater Sacramento region nearly as tight at 6.4%. The hospitals currently most impacted by the pandemic, in the Southern California and San Joaquin Valley regions, continued to struggle with zero percent ICU capacity available and used adhoc facilities set up by the state to ensure all patients can get care.
Vaccination rates continued to lag behind distribution. California had administered 734,405 vaccine shots as of Saturday, out of nearly 2.2 million doses shipped to local health departments and health care systems in several counties .
Globally, more than 90 million people have been infected and nearly 2 million people have died, including more than 374,000 Americans, data tracked by Johns Hopkins University shows.