Although hospitals are crowded with patients, with bleak numbers of deaths and COVID-19 infection rates hovering at dangerous levels, there are some signs that the daily increase in the number of coronavirus cases is beginning to decline in California.
It can take a few more days or weeks to be sure of the trend – and the flattening can be reversed if people further decrease the use of masks and social distance. But several state and local officials are expressing cautious optimism that the rampant and exponential daily worsening of the pandemic has subsided.
Governor Gavin Newsom described the flat numbers as “light at the end of the tunnel”, adding that the rate of positivity for the coronavirus test and the number of people in hospitals and intensive care units with COVID-19 have declined.
“We saw some encouraging signs,” said Newsom. “But now, more than ever, it is up to us not to let our guard down, not to remove our masks and make sure that we are doing everything in our power to maintain that discipline, determination to work our way through another wave.”
The rate of positive coronavirus test results started to decline.
(Los Angeles Times)
Even in Los Angeles County, which was hit hard, there was a flash on Friday that the crisis might not be getting any worse, at least for now. But conditions in hospitals are so dire that officials say there is little to celebrate, and there is still concern that things could get worse quickly.
“It is difficult to know what to do with a raise one day [and] a little lower the other day, ”said Dr. Paul Simon, director of science for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. “I am hopeful that we are stagnating. We are stagnating at a very, very high level, unfortunately. … This is a very high level of community dissemination. “
In LA County, the average daily number of coronavirus cases in a weekly period rose to one of the highest numbers in the pandemic – to 15,102 in the seven-day period that ended on Wednesday. But on Friday night, the county averaged 14,600 cases a day for a weekly period. On Friday, a Times count found 14,557 cases recorded in LA County.
California hit one of its worst daily average numbers of new coronavirus cases on Sunday – almost 45,000 cases a day, the second highest number in the pandemic. But since then, the number has stopped increasing and fluctuates between 41,000 and 44,000 cases a day.
The last time California recorded a record number of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 was on January 6, reaching 21,936. The last number of registrations with the highest number of patients in the ICU COVID-19 was on Sunday, with 4,868 in the ICU.
As of Thursday, there were 20,998 people with COVID-19 in California hospitals, including 4,745 in the ICU.
Dr. Mark Ghaly, state secretary for health and human services, said in an interview this week that recent relative improvements in pandemic trends are a sign that regional requests for stay at home began to be put into practice about six years ago weeks are working.
Nothing is certain that there will still be no significant increase in the coming weeks, but there is a little more optimism that the recent increase was “blunt … compared to what we were preparing for,” said Ghaly.
But it may just be a momentary upside, as officials express concern over a more contagious coronavirus variant, first identified in Britain in September, which is expected to circulate more widely in California and could quickly become the dominant strain in March.
Preliminary studies suggest that it is about 50% more transmissible than the conventional variety and, if more people are infected, hospitalizations will get worse and more people will die. It has already been identified in the counties of San Diego and San Bernardino.
“We are very concerned about this variant because we saw what happened in England, where it went from a relatively infrequent source of infection in the early fall to … being the predominant strain in southeastern England,” said Simon.
LA County officials did not release additional information on Friday about whether to issue new orders to prevent the disease from spreading. Configurations that could be examined still include outdoor gyms, which were allowed to open at 50% capacity, and indoor and retail malls, which were supposed to be open at only 20% capacity, said Mayor Eric Garcetti on Thursday night -market.
Simon acknowledged that the public is exhausted from fighting the pandemic. And “in the last few months we have seen less adherence to our restrictions. … We can implement additional restrictions, but unless they are met, they will not have the desired impact. “
“I think our greatest hope, to be honest, is to launch this vaccine as soon as possible. We are working hard to do this and continue to plead with people to follow our restrictions as much as possible, ”he said.
Even though people cannot adhere to all restrictions all the time, Simon said, he encouraged people to adhere to them as much as possible. For example, the official guidance of LA County is to prohibit meetings between people outside your home. But he also said that going for a walk with some friends who are also at home – while everyone wears masks and keeps themselves physically apart from each other – is probably a safe activity.
“We just don’t want you to get together in large groups,” he said. “We recognize the pain of social isolation that has just been overwhelming. … We are just encouraging people to stand their ground. We are, I think, on a favorable path with the vaccine. “
The fact that vaccines have been reported to be 95% effective, said Simon, “is almost a miracle.”
The daily death toll in California remains extraordinarily high. On Friday, the state reported a record number of COVID-19 deaths in a single day – 700, according to a count of health jurisdictions conducted by The Times, breaking the record of 685 set on January 8.
California now has an average of 536 reported deaths per day in the past week, a record and roughly the equivalent of one death every three minutes. Nearly 33,000 Californians with COVID-19 died in this pandemic.
LA County reported 260 deaths on Friday. The county has averaged 233 deaths a day in the past week, one of the highest figures in the pandemic.
Hospitals across Southern California continue to struggle with a terrible overcrowding. In Los Angeles County, the hospital morgues are so crowded that 16 members of the California National Guard have been called in to help store the corpses while funeral homes and mortuaries make up for the delay. As of Tuesday, the LA County coroner was holding about 150 bodies among people who died of COVID-19.
Riverside County also acquired additional storage space to store hulls – 10 refrigerated trailers, eight of which can store 50 bodies per trailer.
There are complicated reasons for delays. Sometimes families take longer to make decisions “because they hope to be able to wait a while and maybe bring the family together,” said Shane Reichardt, spokesman for Riverside County’s Emergency Management Department. “There are some financial concerns. … People are struggling financially for a number of reasons, many of them related to COVID. “
There were so many people with COVID-19 in the 17 hospitals in Riverside County that 133% of the county’s licensed ICU beds were occupied earlier this week. This means that hospitals have been forced to convert hospital beds not normally used for critically ill patients and to readjust them to accommodate ICU patients.
“Some hospitals are doing things like converting conference rooms … into patient areas,” said Reichardt.
Efforts are underway to convert a 65-bed outpatient surgery center at the Riverside University Health System Medical Center, the county’s public hospital, to expand ICU and high medical acuity capabilities. And at Riverside Community Hospital, efforts are being made to reuse an area set aside for future expansion of the emergency department to accommodate critically ill patients.
The hospitals in Orange County were so busy this week that the Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center activated their county-supplied 25-bed mobile field hospital. Another was installed at Los Alamitos Medical Center, but has not yet been used, said Jennifer Bayer, a spokeswoman for Tenet Healthcare, which runs the two hospitals, as well as the Lakewood Regional Medical Center and Placentia-Linda Hospital.
But only in the past few days, hospital officials have noted a slight stability in hospitalizations. “It is not climbing. Is holding, “ Said Bayer. “We hope it will be a leveling – I think it is too early to say. It really was just the last few days. “
Times staff writer Iris Lee contributed to this report.