In a Los Angeles hospital, there are five stalls outside, one serving as a waiting room.
© Mario Tama / Getty Images
APPLE VALLEY, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 23: (FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY) A patient is lying on a stretcher in the overburdened corridor of the Providence St. Mary Medical Center amid a sudden increase in patients with COVID-19 in southern California on December 23, 2020 in Apple Valley, California. The 213-bed hospital in San Bernardino County is currently treating at least 140 inpatients with positive COVID 19, operating at approximately 250% of the ICU capacity. Southern California remains with zero percent of its bed capacity in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) amid an increase in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. (Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images)
Many patients are arriving at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, some are being placed in the gift shop, a chapel or a conference room.
In the past week, nearly 100,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported in Los Angeles County, and that causes problems for what to do with other patients.
Hospital CEO Dr. Elaine Batchlor told CNN on Monday: “If we continue to see an increase in the number of patients at Covid, we may be forced to do something that, as healthcare professionals, we all really hate having. to think about. “
She was talking about rationing care. It is not currently business as usual.
“Our team has been incredibly skilled and flexible to accommodate an increasing number of patients, so, as you heard, we have five tents outside the hospital,” said Batchlor. “We have patients in our conference room, in our chapel.”
Many apples are taken to the gift shop, she said.
Although Batchlor did not specify how many new patients Covid has, the increase in his numbers is stressing all care.
Batchlor said the hospital will not refuse patients, but may have to employ techniques that were used during the war.
“We use what on the battlefield is called screening techniques, which is to assess each person’s needs and prognosis and use scarce resources with patients who are most likely to benefit from them,” she said.
LA County Health Services Director Christina Ghaly said some hospitals are treating patients who are still in ambulances.
“These patients are being seen and treated in the ambulance as if it were part of the emergency room compartment,” said Ghaly.
LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said there were 97,472 new cases in the past seven days. “The sad reality is that all the indicators show us that our situation can only get worse in the beginning of 2021,” she said.
Hospitalizations reach historic levels
More Americans were hospitalized last week than any other week in the pandemic, according to the Covid Tracking Project. And the United States reported 121,235 current hospitalizations for Covid-19 on Monday, a pandemic peak.
Six states set records on Sunday for the largest number of patients admitted to Covid-19: Alabama, California, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. Texas reached a historic record on Monday.
Doctors say mass meetings on holidays will lead to even more patients – a big problem because many hospitals are already over capacity.
“It’s really frustrating, because if you look at the data from the last 10 days, they really started showing some signs of light,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine at George Washington University.
“Places like the Midwest, with a drop in the number of cases. Even in the Northeast. The US positivity rate dropped from around 12% to around 10%. These are really tangible signs of a slowing down of the crisis. And now it will almost certainly be another peak. “
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And unlike previous holidays, the Christmas-New Year combination spans an entire week.
“We know that after each major holiday, there has been an increase in the number of cases,” said emergency medical doctor, Dr. Leana Wen.
“We saw this after Memorial Day, after the Fourth of July, after Labor Day. And these holidays were relatively short compared to Christmas and New Year.”
In addition, the climate is much colder now – which means more indoor meetings and a greater risk of aerosol spread.
Patients are occupying more and more ICU beds
ICUs are often associated with heart attacks and car accidents, but an increasing number of ICU beds are occupied by patients with Covid-19.
Last week, about 40% of all ICU patients in the U.S. had Covid-19, according to a CNN analysis of data published Monday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
This is a 16% increase at the end of September; 22% at the end of October; and 35% at the end of November.
And more hospitalizations inevitably precede more deaths.
The deaths of more than 63,000 Americans have been reported so far this month – most of any month since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University.
In just 11 months, more than 334,000 people died from Covid-19. This means that more than 1 in 1,000 Americans died of coronavirus.
And since most Americans cannot be vaccinated until next year, the United States faces a “sudden increase” after vacation travel, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health.
New travel requirements take effect on Monday
As more countries detect the highly contagious coronavirus strain first identified in the UK, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced new testing requirements for travelers arriving from the UK.
The new rules take effect on Monday. Passengers must have had a PCR or negative antigen test within 72 hours of boarding a flight from the UK to the USA, along with documentation of their laboratory results.
Airlines will be required to confirm the test before the flight.
So far, dozens of countries have banned travelers from the UK.
All viruses mutate over time, and the new coronavirus has mutated before. But scientists advising the UK government estimate that this strain may be up to 70% more effective in spreading than others.
The companies behind the first two vaccines to obtain emergency clearance in the U.S. – Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna – are testing their vaccines to confirm that they are effective against the new strain.
Biotechnology company Novavax – which announced the launch of a phase 3 trial of its Covid-19 vaccine in the United States on Monday – said it is also testing its vaccine against the UK strain.
The results will take weeks, the company said.
Vaccine launch is slower than expected
About 2.1 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, according to the CDC. More than 11.4 million doses have been distributed.
These numbers now include the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. And while there are delays in data reports, federal officials had previously said they were working to distribute 20 million doses by the end of the year.
Asked about the apparent slow distribution of vaccines, Fauci said that large and comprehensive vaccine programs with a new vaccine start slowly before gaining momentum.
“I am quite confident that as we gain more and more momentum, as we transition from December to January and after February to March, I believe that we will achieve the projection,” he said.
Dr. Esther Choo, a professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, said that distributing the vaccine is “just a very complicated thing.”
“At each stage, there is complexity and the possibility of delay, whether in individual state planning, allocation, training, vaccine supply, storage … there are many factors at this stage,” said Choo.
“We need to be prepared for the fact that it will be a slow implementation in many places and will not change our behavior or necessarily the path of the pandemic in this country in the short term,” said Choo.
With vaccines likely not widely available until summer, experts urged Americans not to let their guard down. This means continuing to wear masks, washing your hands frequently and socializing.
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