December was the worst month of the COVID-19 pandemic in California.
But January must also be bleak.
Authorities are preparing for more hospitalizations for COVID-19 as people who have attended vacation or travel meetings and become infected with the coronavirus become ill.
Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said that a person who was exposed to the virus at a Christmas party may be infected on New Year’s Eve. But that individual can be asymptomatic, go to a New Year’s Eve party and spread the disease without knowing it, he said.
Coupled with a high infection rate – about 1 in 95 in Los Angeles County are contagious with the virus, according to county estimates – the holidays are creating a “viral fire,” said Kim-Farley.
Health officials have asked those who traveled during the holiday to be quarantined for 10 days to determine whether they develop signs of the disease.
“It’s a really big disaster if people come back and then get right back to work,” said LA County public health director Barbara Ferrer on Thursday.
How will it be in January?
The authorities are not sure how bad the postnatal increase will be.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who served as head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the Trump administration until 2019, said on CBS News on Sunday that January would be largely a “dark month”.
“Even if we start to see a level of cases and a drop in the first week of January, it really won’t be [until] in late January, we started to see the burden on hospitals decrease and we started to see a plateau of deaths, ”said Gottlieb in“ Face the Nation ”.
“At the moment, the cases are being led from the back: California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey to some extent. When you look at the Midwest, when you look at the Great Lakes, Illinois, Michigan, you start to see cases dropping quite noticeably, ”said Gottlieb.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States government’s leading infectious disease specialist, said on Sunday on CNN that the worst is yet to come, believing that an increase related to the Christmas and New Year holidays will, in fact, materialize. .
“When you are dealing with a baseline of 200,000 new cases per day and about 2,000 deaths per day – with hospitalizations there are more than 120,000 – we are really at a very critical point,” said Fauci.
Are there any promising signs?
Of course, the vaccine is expected to dramatically improve conditions – but not in the short term.
California recorded what may be the start of a flattening of new cases just before Christmas; the average number of daily coronavirus cases during the previous seven days peaked on Tuesday at around 45,000 a day before dropping to 42,000 a day on Thursday, the day before many counties stopped reporting daily counts in leaves because of the holiday weekend.
LA County averaged about 15,000 new cases of coronavirus a day during the weekly period that ended on Tuesday; on Sunday night, the average was about 14,000 cases a day. It remains to be seen whether this is a flattening of new cases or the result of delays in notification during the holiday.
But even if LA County is stabilizing, health officials warn that the high number of cases is putting hospitals at greater risk of overcrowding and a greater chance of poorer quality of care.
“If we have leveled, we will be leveling between 14,000 and 15,000 cases a day, which is too high to have any comfort in those numbers,” said Ferrer on Wednesday. “We would have to level at a much lower rate to protect our hospitals.”
COVID-19 patients in the hospital now reflect coronavirus cases diagnosed two weeks earlier – a time when LA County had an average of 11,000 new cases per day. This means that hospitals are yet to see increasing demand in the new year because of infections that occurred in early December.
And current infections do not take into account the expected increase in virus transmission at Christmas as a result of travel. If there were half of the virus transmission that occurred on Thanksgiving Day, “we are in serious trouble,” said Ferrer. A Christmas wave would be the third since the beginning of November, which would lead LA County to “exponential case growth”.
An increase related to the Christmas and New Year celebrations could put additional strain on hospitals, said LA County Health Services Director Dr. Christina Ghaly last week.
“Given the very, very high rate of hospitalization we are already in – where hospitals are already overburdened and overburdened – it’s a situation that could easily become catastrophic in January if we have this sudden increase,” said Ghaly. That is why it is so important that people stay at home during the holidays and do not physically interact with people outside the home, she said.
What are the conditions in hospitals?
The daily net increase in the number of people with COVID-19 in California intensive care units continues to increase, although the pace has slowed modestly. For the seven-day period that ended on Saturday, a net average of 73 new ICU patients was added daily to ICUs across the state; the comparable number a week earlier was 113.
In LA County, the number of COVID-19 patients in the ICU has increased by about 19% in the past week; the comparable figure in the previous week was 33%. Orange County also saw similar trends.
The moderate pace of net increase in ICU patients is welcome and probably a sign that the three-week home order in effect in most of California is starting to work.
But that means that ICUs are still crowded more than ever, at a time when many in California are crowded, with critically ill patients trapped in emergency rooms when they should be placed elsewhere in the hospital.
The availability of ICUs in southern California and the San Joaquin Valley remains at 0%, and hospital systems have begun to make plans to ration patient care if the demand far exceeds supplies or equipment. The risk of dying will increase dramatically if there are many seriously ill people in the hospital who cannot be safely accommodated by the limited supply of doctors, nurses and other medical staff.
Cumulatively, California reported 2.13 million coronavirus cases and 24,288 deaths, according to an independent county-by-county count by The Times. Golden State has been hit hard in the past two weeks, with more than half a million cases registered.
On a per capita basis, in the most recent two-week period, California ranks second with the highest number of coronavirus cases reported by 100,000 residents, just below Tennessee.
Cumulatively, however, California ranks 34th among the 50 states with the highest number of coronavirus cases per capita – probably a result of a relatively more successful implementation of the order to stay home in the spring and the closing of certain types of businesses in the summer that kept the first two waves of the pandemic much more in check.
But growing tiredness and widespread rejections of calls to stay at home have resulted in the worst pandemic wave in California.
In LA, however, some ambulance patients are having to wait up to eight hours before being allowed into the emergency room, and hospitals are dangerously low on oxygen. Emergency rooms are so full that most hospitals have been forced to divert ambulances elsewhere during certain times of the day.
State officials said on Sunday that Southern California and several other areas are likely to continue to follow regional restrictions on home stay for a few more weeks as the recent increase is bringing hospitals to the breaking point.
President Trump on Saturday targeted California in Twitter, writing that “the blockades in Democratic-run states are absolutely ruining the lives of so many people,” adding that “California cases have increased despite the blockade, but Florida and others are open and doing well.”
Cumulatively, however, Florida recorded a higher number of deaths per capita than California, with 103 deaths per 100,000 residents of Florida, while California reported 62 deaths per 100,000 residents of California. If California had the same death rate as Florida, its cumulative number of deaths would be about 40,000, instead of the 24,000 it is today.
Times staff writers Brittny Mejia and Dakota Smith contributed to this report.