January will be a dark month, health experts said.
The bright side: two promising vaccines are now available to alleviate the relentless pandemic. On the other hand, the pace of national vaccination has been slower than expected, and the potentially rapid spread of a mutant strain may threaten another wave of infections beyond the peak of vacation.
“It looks like we’re in the abyss now, sinking down to the bottom,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus in the infectious diseases and vaccinology division at UC Berkeley School of Public Health. “We are not going to get any balance in our lives again until probably February.”
As the number of pandemic deaths in the country exceeded 350,000 on Sunday, the capacity for intensive care in most of California remained extremely stressed. In the Bay Area hospitals, available capacity increased on Sunday to still precarious 8.4%, compared to 5.1% the day before, according to state health data.
“We have to go through this very dark month of January to feel much better about where we are going with the pandemic,” said Swartzberg.
The Greater Sacramento region had 10.3% availability of ICUs, and the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California regions remained unavailable in their standard ICU units. Both regions had outbreak facilities to go through.
On January 1, 414,684 doses of vaccine were administered throughout California. The state distributed more than 1.7 million doses to healthcare systems and hospitals as of December 28.
With a seemingly rapid mutant strain that became dominant in the UK reaching California, Anthony Armada, CEO of the AHMC Seton Medical Center in Daly City, said he was confident that the vaccine would cover any variants. Seton, who has administered 900 doses of vaccine so far to priority frontline respondents, had six of his 14 ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients on Sunday. A second 14-bed ward is empty due to the regional shortage of ICU nurses.
“If Thanksgiving Day is an indicator, we can only predict a situation that has been going on since the recent holidays with the increase, which I predict will last until the rest of this month,” said Armada.
In Santa Clara County, hospitals are so congested that health officials reported on Saturday that some ambulances had to wait outside the emergency rooms for up to seven hours for beds to open.
The delays mean that ambulances cannot answer other calls and that firefighters are sometimes called on to transport people to the emergency rooms.
There were no reports until Sunday that other counties in the Bay Area experienced similar delays for ambulances. In San Mateo County, although delayed ambulances were not a problem, authorities “continue to monitor the situation closely,” said spokesman Preston Merchant by email, adding: “We also see this situation as regional, therefore tensions in the bay area can affect any hospital in the region. “
Across California, as the crisis hits hospitals in the southern and central valley regions, Governor Gavin Newsom said he has activated a mutual aid system for hospitals, under which paramedics and other emergency technicians can be sent to health systems. on specific needs for 14 days. One beneficiary is the Petaluma Valley Hospital in Sonoma County, which is receiving help from Solano County.
Even as hospitals struggle to keep up with the burden of patients, the debate is growing over the distribution of vaccines, which some are framing as a race against time with the virus.
Dr. Robert Wachter, head of the UCSF medical department, wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Sunday that health leaders had hoped for more than two vaccines so far.
Since a single vaccine injection still offers substantial protection – although it is unclear for how long – Wachter suggested that people wait a little on the second dose of what was planned as a two-dose regimen until more doses of the vaccine were available. . In the column, co-written with Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, he wrote: “We hoped that additional vaccines would be available now. But only the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been authorized and are being produced more slowly than expected. Even more worrying are the distribution bottlenecks that are making it difficult for people to vaccinate as quickly as possible. “
It is an issue that has sparked a vigorous debate among health experts, who are increasingly concerned about the possible spread of the apparently more infectious variant that made the disease soar in the UK
Swartzberg had a different view. In an interview on Sunday, he said that although he had great respect for Wachter, “The logistics of suddenly changing in the middle of giving vaccines would be very formidable and coming back in three or four months to vaccinate those people who just received a dose, if they know logistically how to do this and if it could be very effective if we ended up receiving just one dose for a huge number of people ”.
He also said that “there is almost no data on what type of immune response will be maintained after a dose and that worries me a lot. We can end this short-lived protective immunity and get worse than we were before. “
Meanwhile, the evidence that the mutant strain has spread in California continues to mount. San Bernardino County found two cases of the virus variant, and San Diego County found one. Experts have no doubt that it is much more widespread, because most virus samples are not analyzed for their strain.
Even without the rapidly spreading mutant strain becoming dominant – which experts fear could happen in the United States as soon as spring – hospitals will continue their relentless and resolute struggle. “The problem is that we will be suffering the consequences of the holidays throughout the month of January, which is why it will be much worse,” said Swartzberg, adding that the increase in the first two weeks of December “was a direct reflection of the effect of Thanksgiving. “
Sam Whiting, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, contributed to this report.
Tatiana Sanchez is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @TatianaYSanchez