California’s virus hospitalizations fall, but deaths still high

LOS ANGELES — As a hospice nurse, Antonio Espinoza worked to ease people’s passage into death. At 36 years old, it seemed unlikely he soon would be on that journey.

But when the coronavirus hit Espinoza, he spiraled from fever to chills to labored breathing that sent him to a Southern California hospital, where he died Monday, a little more than a week after being admitted.

Espinoza is among the latest to succumb in what has become California’s deadliest surge. An average of 544 people died every day in the past week, and on Saturday the state reached the milestone of 40,000 deaths overall, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

In barely a year since the virus was first detected in the state, one in 1,000 Californians have died from it.

Espinoza’s wife, Nancy, watched through a glass window in the hospital as her husband took his last breaths, then was allowed in the room to be with him. She is figuring out how she will raise their 3-yearold son alone.

“I just had so much faith,” she said. “Never in my mind would it have crossed me that it would be this serious, even though we hear about it all the time.”

California’s death toll has climbed

rapidly since the worst surge of the pandemic started in mid-October. New cases and hospitalizations surged to record highs but have declined rapidly in the past two weeks.

Deaths remain staggeringly high, however, with more than 3,800 in the past week.

It took six months for California to record its first 10,000 deaths, then four months to double to 20,000. In five more weeks, the state reached 30,000. It then took only 20 days to get to 40,000.

Now only New York has more deaths — fatalities there have topped 43,000 — but at this pace California will eclipse that too.

For much of the year, California was a model for how to control the virus. It issued the first statewide shutdown last March and has imposed restrictions that have frustrated business owners but that state officials insist have saved lives.

Cases fell after a peak in July, then started climbing again in the fall. Gov. Gavin Newsom activated what he called the “emergency brake” on Nov. 16 to halt reopening the state’s economy, keeping most public schools closed, barring indoor church services and limiting the number of customers in stores.

But the coronavirus was barreling along like a runaway train. With Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s looming, public health officials warned people not to gather with those outside their homes.

Still, hospitalizations skyrocketed, and on Dec. 3, Newsom issued a stay-home order that divided the state into five regions and required more businesses to close or reduce capacity if their region’s intensive care units fell to 15 percent capacity. Four regions with 98 percent of the state’s population reached that level.

Eugene Garcia The Associated Press Nancy Espinoza sits with her son at their home in Corona, Calif., while holding a photo of her husband, Antonio Espinoza, who died of COVID-19 three days earlier.