California officials have painted an increasingly catastrophic picture of the state’s Covid-19 crisis in recent days, exactly what they had warned would come, as the state faces an oxygen shortage.
California deployed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the California Emergency Medical Services Authority to supply and refill oxygen tanks.
In Los Angeles County, emergency workers were instructed to conserve oxygen and administer the minimum amount of oxygen to maintain patients’ oxygen saturation level at or just above 90%. (A level below 90 or below is a concern for people with Covid-19.)
Officials in the most populous county in the United States said that one person is infected every six seconds in the county and that one in five residents currently tested has been infected with Covid-19. “Your bubble is not as safe as you think,” the department tweeted.
Governor Gavin Newsom warned that the worst is yet to come: a “wave upon wave” caused by post-holiday infections.
On Tuesday night, 4,374 people with Covid-19 died in the previous two weeks, compared with 3,202 in the previous two weeks.
In some cases, there will be nowhere for the victims of this wave to go.
Los Angeles County health officials have instructed ambulance teams not to transport some cardiac arrest patients whose survival is unlikely. In some hospitals, patients are lined up outside while staff try to find sleeping space.
California had few hospital beds before the pandemic, and ICU capacity in much of the state had not been around for weeks.
The rise in Southern California was so severe that industry groups themselves called for a pause in film and television production, which was allowed even after the ban on outdoor dining. SAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 industry workers, joined groups representing producers and advertisers to call for a personal stoppage of production on Sunday.
Their statement noted that even if workers do not contract the virus, they are still at risk of injury due to acrobatics, equipment failures or falls.
“With few or no hospital beds available, it is difficult to understand how an injured worker on the set should seek treatment,” said David White, national executive director of SAG-AFTRA.
The Grammy Awards, one of the entertainment industry’s biggest nights, was postponed on Tuesday, from January 31 to March 14. In Los Angeles.