Los Angeles County reported more than 300 new deaths from COVID-19 on Friday, its highest single-day count so far.
According to preliminary and incomplete figures issued by local health jurisdictions, the county saw at least 309 additional deaths – a number that would easily break the previous 291 high recorded on New Year’s Eve.
The self-reported record occurred on the one-year anniversary that the county issued its first coronavirus health alert.
During the 12-month period, what that warning called “an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown etiology in the city of Wuhan, China” has become the “most significant infectious disease” of the past century, said Dr. Paul Simon, director of science to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
“The scale of the tragedy associated with this pandemic is unfathomable, especially since much of it was preventable,” he said during a briefing on Friday.
Cumulatively, LA County has reported at least 889,000 coronavirus cases and at least 11,800 deaths. More than half a million cases of coronavirus and more than 4,300 of those deaths have been reported since Thanksgiving.
And considering what happened in the last vacation, Simon said that “we anticipate that the number of hospitalizations and deaths will remain high throughout this month”.
The leader of a commercial group representing California hospitals said on Friday that the peak of the current wave is expected to flood the state’s healthcare system after a week or more.
Even though hospitals across the state are already struggling with record numbers of patients with COVID-19, “we anticipate that the worst of this is reaching another week or 10 days, and may continue into February,” said Carmela Coyle, president and chief executive of California Hospital Assn.
“This was unprecedented for our state, unprecedented for the nation, unprecedented for the world,” she said during a conference call. “But we find ourselves today, in terms of numbers, at a point where we are standing on a beach and watching a tsunami approaching.”
California is adding, on average, just under 40,000 new cases of coronavirus every day – a rate that has recently stabilized, but is still huge and has equally great consequences.
State officials said that about 12% of people with infections diagnosed with coronavirus will need to be hospitalized. If that calculation is true, the nearly 278,000 confirmed cases across the state since New Year’s Day will end up with about 33,000 Californians in hospitals in the coming weeks.
When it comes to the impact of COVID-19 on the hospital system, “the story was written weeks before, and this latency between viral spread and infection and the need for intensive care,” said Coyle.
“We all expected to see some decrease in those numbers,” she said. “That was not the case.”
Health officials have long pointed out that the progression of the pandemic is predictable and inevitable. People are infected with the virus and, in about two weeks, some become sick enough to require hospitalization. Soon after that, some patients’ conditions will worsen to the point that they need intensive care, and a part of them will die.
The slow nature of the disease’s progression means that it takes weeks to fully assess the consequences of the actions of residents and businesses. It also takes weeks for renewed personal surveillance or recently imposed restrictions to start showing results.
Health officials said the current outbreak of violence in California started around November 1, but started to increase in early December – fueled by travel and meetings during the Thanksgiving holiday.
There is real concern that a similar pattern is about to hit the state after the winter holiday season.
Although hospital populations change regularly as new patients arrive and existing ones are discharged or die, California’s health care system is already depleted by the relentless increase and there are fears that it will be difficult to deal with more.
On Thursday, the most recent day for which complete data is available, there were 21,855 coronavirus-positive patients hospitalized in California, with 4,812 in intensive care.
Although the number of patients is no longer increasing at the pace of weeks ago and has fluctuated slightly in the past few days, it has still increased by 15% since Christmas. More patients with COVID-19 also need intensive care.
As the number of newly infected Californians remains high, there is no short-term relief in sight.
“We are predicting another 15,000 individuals between now and January 18 who need inpatient hospital care,” said Coyle. “This is a difficult situation. It is tight. And he’s tense. “
Unless transmission is controlled, hospitals across LA County and the state will continue to be overburdened with patients with COVID-19.
In LA County, hospitalizations have stabilized at a high number, ranging from 7,900 to 8,100 from Monday to Thursday. Although the county has recently avoided some of the sharp growth seen at the beginning of the increase, officials have warned that this level of hospitalizations is unsustainable, having plunged the health system into crisis, created a shortage of available ambulances and forced patients to wait hours per beds open.
Another increase, officials said, could potentially force hospitals to ration care if resources and staff were too scarce.
“It is difficult, I think, for many of us to relate to what our nurses, doctors and other hospital leaders are dealing with now,” said Coyle. “There is no doubt that in some parts of the state, people who have dedicated and committed their lives to caring and healing are seeing things they never imagined seeing before.”
So many people are dying of COVID-19 in Los Angeles County that state officials now plan to install temporary morgues to help deal with the number of bodies.
The move was announced by the California Governor’s Emergency Services Office on Thursday – the same day that LA County reported 205 new COVID-19 deaths and, for the third consecutive day, more than 200 angelenos died in the pandemic. .
LA County had an average of 171 deaths from COVID-19 a day last week, and officials have warned that the death toll will only continue to increase unless the region can contain the violent coronavirus.
“We lost many lives to COVID-19 in LA County and, unfortunately, we will continue to lose more until we can get everyone to work together to break the chain of transmission,” said county public health director Barbara Ferrer said this week.
State officials said a temporary morgue would be located in a parking lot near the LA County coroner’s office and would include at least a dozen 53-foot trailers provided by the county and Cal OES, as well as other refrigerated storage containers.
Cal OES also facilitated the distribution of 88 additional refrigerated trailers – 10 of which were designed to serve as temporary morgues and were shipped to locations in Los Angeles, Imperial, Sonoma, San Bernardino and Monterey counties, according to a statement from the office .
These features will help “ensure that we don’t receive large backups or, if we have backups, they will take care of them [with] respect and dignity [and] that we have the appropriate equipment installed or the materials needed for coroners and coroners to deal with the deceased, ”said Cal OES director Mark Ghilarducci in a statement.
The state’s actions are the latest in an effort to ease the pressure on hospital morgues and private morgues that are running out of storage space for the bodies of COVID-19 victims.
Authorities said last week that the California National Guard was called in to assist county officials as the corpses from the hospital’s morgues are transferred to the LA County Medical Examiner’s warehouse.
More than 28,000 Californians died of COVID-19 during the pandemic – and the number of victims is skyrocketing.
The state averaged 368 daily deaths in the past week, a 45% increase from two weeks ago, according to data compiled by The Times.
Since Christmas, nearly 4,600 people across the state have died from COVID-19.
LA County was hit particularly hard. The more than 11,500 coronavirus-related deaths in the county represent 40% of California’s total, although the county accounts for only a quarter of the state’s population.
The second highest death toll is 2,189 in Riverside County. In the last week, an average of 204 people died every day from COVID-19 in that municipality.
LA County registered the fourth highest daily number of new coronavirus cases on Thursday, at 18,764, according to a Times count from local health jurisdictions. This is well above last week’s daily average of around 14,000.
California published just under 40,000 new cases of coronavirus on Thursday, continuing a trend last week that shows the state daily total flattening around that level. This is slightly less than the peak in mid-December, when California reported about 45,000 new cases a day.
However, the authorities warned that the case rate still remains too high to provide any real relief.
“I don’t believe this is a new level that will automatically drop,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Thursday. “In fact, I believe that this is just a break before a new peak brought about by the evidence we see of a lot of movement that happened around Christmas and New Year. So wait, because things can get worse. “
About one in five coronavirus tests performed daily in LA County are positive, a surprising rate that highlights how many people are infected – and infectious.
“We have the power to control this virus if we decide to do that, and it depends on us,” said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director of county health services, this week.
But the worst, as Garcetti predicted, is probably yet to come. Most people in LA County hospitals with COVID-19 were infected before Christmas. Only next week, experts say, will it become clear how much worse the post-holiday increase can be.
At this point, authorities and experts say the best way for Californians to protect themselves from the coronavirus is to stay at home as long as possible. If you venture out, it is important to use facial coverage and keep physical distance from people outside your home, the authorities emphasize.
Ferrer said that “we cannot stress enough to have to, at this point, find our way to really change the trajectory we are on.”
“There is really no way to go to help our hospitals unless we reduce the number of cases. It just doesn’t exist, ”she said. “High numbers of cases automatically translate into a large number of people who need hospital care.”
Times staff writers Iris Lee and Lila Seidman contributed to this report.