By Lucy Nicholson
MISSION VIEJO, California (Reuters) – Southern California is so overwhelmed with coronavirus cases that patients are paralyzed trying to enter hospitals and the corpses are trapped in another stalemate after they leave.
At a hospital in Orange County, ambulances crowded with patients line up outside, waiting for a place in the intensive care unit, and patients at COVID-19 crowd the emergency room aisle.
In neighboring Los Angeles County, where people are dying from the disease every eight minutes, and other hard-hit areas, refrigerated trailers will be brought in to provide extra body storage capacity.
“When we are full of COVID patients, we cannot take care of the community at large,” said Dr. Jim Keany, 54, the managing partner of emergency physicians at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. “All beds are full, all nurses and doctors are busy taking care of COVID’s patients.”
A patient waited in the ambulance for more than five hours before being admitted, Keany said.
Despite the strict stay-at-home measures that were strengthened in almost the entire state last month, California, the most populous state with almost 40 million people, leads the United States with almost 2.6 million cases of COVID-19 , more than a million more than the next state, according to a count of official data from Reuters.
Its death toll of more than 28,000 surpasses only those in New York and Texas.
With the bodies piling up, the California Emergency Services Office said it had arranged for 88 trailers to be sent to underserved areas across the state.
The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office will receive 10 trailers from the morgue, in addition to the 12 installed there in April, said spokeswoman Sarah Ardalani.
Orange County officials had allowed hospitals to divert patients to other places when they were full, but now that virtually all hospitals have reached capacity, the policy has been rescinded, resulting in long waits for treatment, Keany said.
“We are taking our carpenters and facility staff to the extreme in an attempt to build a space where we can care for patients,” said Keany.
Dr. Robert Goldberg, 44, a pulmonary and intensive care physician at Providence Mission Hospital, called on the public to help reduce the threat by wearing masks, maintaining social distance and receiving the vaccine as soon as it is available.
“COVID is real. It is a threat to life,” said Goldberg. “People of all ages are dying. We need to work together. We need to get over this together.”
(Reporting by Lucy Nicholson; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman and Jane Ross; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by William Mallard)