Los Angeles County reported 13,315 new cases of COVID-19 and 58 additional deaths today, along with another new record for hospitalizations related to the coronavirus.
The numbers bring the county’s totals to 623,670 cases and 8,875 fatalities since the pandemic began in March. There are 5,549 people in county hospitals with the virus.
“Our hospitals are critically overcrowded in LA County,” said Dr. Brad Spellberg, chief medical officer at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.
Health care workers are hard-pressed to keep up with the need for care.
Nerissa Black, a nurse at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, estimated she’s been averaging less than 10 minutes of care per patient every hour. That includes not just bedside care, but donning gear, writing up charts, reviewing lab results and conferring with doctors, she said.
“And the patients who are coming in are more sick now than they’ve ever been, because a lot of people are waiting before they get care. So when they do come in, they’re really, really sick,” Black said Sunday.
Across LA County at UCLA Health Santa Monica Medical Center, nurse Wendy Macedo said all 25 beds on her unit are filled with COVID-19 patients. She said a ward on another floor that had been devoted to orthopedic patients has been converted to care for people who have tested positive for the virus. Nurses are working longer shifts, and more of them, she said.
“The more patients we have, the more there’s a risk of making a mistake, especially if we’re rushing,” Macedo said Sunday. ”Obviously we’re trying to avoid that, but we’re only human.”
As of Friday, Long Beach still had about 10% capacity in its ICU, according to Mayor Robert Garcia, but he warned that they were nevertheless “dangerously close to being overwhelmed by our other area hospitals that are close to full.”
When calculated by region, all of Southern California and the 12-county San Joaquin Valley to the north have exhausted their regular ICU capacity, and some hospitals have begun using “surge” space. Overall, the state’s ICU capacity was just 2.1% on Sunday.
Many hospitals are preparing for the possibility of rationing care. A document recently circulated among doctors at the four hospitals run by Los Angeles County calls for them to shift strategy: Instead of trying everything to save a life, their goal during the crisis is to save as many patients as possible. That means those less likely to survive won’t get the same kind of care offered in normal times.
“Some compromise of standard of care is unavoidable; it is not that an entity, system, or locale chooses to limit resources, it is that the resources are clearly not available to provide care in a regular manner,” the document obtained by the Los Angeles Times reads.
The overwhelming wave of critically ill patients is being driven by a significant increase in the pace of the pandemic.
On Dec. 11, the county reached 500,000 cases, and since then, more than 100,000 new cases have been reported—the fastest acceleration of new cases during the pandemic.
If there is a light on the horizon, it is that Pfizer’s initial vaccine allocation is currently being used by acute-care hospitals to vaccinate frontline health care personnel. A second allotment of Pfizer vaccine is anticipated to arrive next week and will be used to inoculate additional health care workers at acute-care hospitals, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced.
“While we now see the light at the end of the tunnel, we haven’t reached the light yet,” said Dr. Spellberg. “The pandemic is going to continue for many, many months after we begin vaccinating people. This is not the time to start ignoring public health advice and recommendations.”
The Associated Press, City News Service and Long Beach Post Breaking News Editor Jeremiah Dobruck contributed to this report.