LOS ANGELES – Hospitals in Los Angeles County are reporting an increase in the number of patients with COVID-19 and some have been forced to temporarily stop ambulance arrivals and use gift shops as makeshift treatment rooms, a report said on Tuesday. .
The Los Angeles Times reported that Los Angeles County is experiencing its most challenging time since the outbreak began. The newspaper said one person died of the virus every 10 minutes in the county on Christmas Eve.
Dr. Christina Ghaly, the county’s director of health services, told the paper that the worst “almost certainly is yet to come” due to the expected increase after Christmas.
The newspaper reported that on Sunday, 94% of hospitals in the municipality that receive patients in ambulances were forced to divert some due to spacing problems and some patients did not leave the ambulances for up to eight hours so that they could be seen inside the vehicle.
STATE WITH ONE OF THE COUNTRY’S STRICTEST BLOCKS HAS MOST COVID CASES
“When you enter the ICU and see all the beds occupied by a ventilated COVID patient, with tubes entering every hole in the body, you begin to understand that we are not dealing with what we were dealing with 10 months ago,” Dr. Brad Spellberg, medical director of the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, told the newspaper.
The models used for planning show that hospitalizations more than doubled in the following month, from about 20,000 to more than 50,000. Los Angeles County, which accounts for a quarter of the state’s 10 million inhabitants, has about 40% of the state’s 24,000 deaths.
The county is approaching the 10,000 death mark.
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“These are numbers that cannot be normalized,” said county supervisor Hilda Solis. “Just like the sound of ambulance sirens, we can’t turn it off.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report