LOS ANGELES – If this were any other year, members of the Los Angeles Opera would be singing Christmas carols this week in the wards of Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, which serves the Latin and poor communities of southern Los Angeles. Instead, a Skid Row street choir appeared with a video to liven up the growing number of dying coronavirus patients and traumatized staff.
Inside the hospital, so many patients are flowing in that stretchers have been placed in the gift shop, and the entire lobby is now a space for treating patients. The waiting room is a tent outside.
“Everything is protected down to the street,” said Dr. Oscar Casillas, medical director of the hospital’s emergency department, which was created to serve about 30 people at a time, but in the past week has seen more than 100 patients a day.
In the High Desert region northeast of Los Angeles, health workers at a hospital are receiving their first injections of a coronavirus vaccine in a cheerful conference room decorated with festive decorations. There is Christmas music and “Home Alone 2” playing on a screen. However, once the needle is out of your arms, there’s the next “blue code” or FaceTime’s next goodbye to match between a dying patient and a grieving family.
“Every day is scary,” said Lisa Thompson, an intensive care nurse at the hospital, Providence St. Mary Medical Center, in Apple Valley. “We are all stressed out before we even go to work. Tons and tons of patients. We cannot even monitor the number of patients arriving at the hospital. “
In increasingly urgent tones this week, health officials and political leaders in Southern California have asked people to stay home during the holiday, in desperate hope of preventing another outbreak of infections, in addition to the current crisis that came after the Day Thanksgiving.
Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said the only way to “honor the fundamental spirit of the holidays” was to stay home.
But so far, very little has slowed the spread of the virus.
Each day in California, which this week became the first state to hit two million registered virus cases, brings a new numbing account of the ongoing tragedy – more cases, more illnesses, more deaths. Southern California, the most populous area in the most populous state, is on the verge of catastrophe. In Los Angeles County, a vast region whose population is almost the size of Michigan, there are about 6,500 people hospitalized with Covid-19, a four-fold increase from last month. The number of patients admitted to intensive care units is close to 1,300, double the previous month.
And the county reported 146 new deaths on Thursday, according to a New York Times database, the equivalent of about one every 10 minutes and the highest pandemic total. Almost all hospitals have exceeded their capacity, placing new beds in any space they can find and preparing for the possibility of rationing care – essentially making terribly difficult decisions about who dies and who lives.
But the availability of beds is not even the most urgent concern. With so many employees falling ill or taking leave after months of treating patients with coronavirus, hospitals are struggling to find enough employees.
“In the beginning, mainly, you saw all these photos and videos from New York and thought, ‘My God, this is never going to get this bad,'” said Mendy Hickey, quality director at St. Mary’s. “And while we have all the supplies we need, it is very bad here and we have no staff to care for patients.”
Mrs. Hickey, a former nurse, recently took shifts in caring for patients in intensive care, in addition to her administrative duties, sometimes working 23 hours a day. She was planning to work late on Christmas Eve and hoped to spend at least Christmas morning with her three daughters before returning to the hospital.
As the holiday season collided with the height of the pandemic in Southern California, there is little joy for health workers on the front lines, who are preparing for the near certainty that things will only get worse. California Governor Gavin Newsom projected that hospitalizations would reach almost 100,000 in January if residents did not close their doors for the holiday. On Thursday, California recorded 351 deaths.
“I can only imagine what will happen after Christmas and the New Year if we don’t educate the community on how to stay home and be safe,” said Thompson, a nurse at St. Mary’s.
Judging by what she sees in her community after yet another traumatizing day in the intensive care unit, she is not optimistic.
“We are all talking about mid-January for when we expect to see a big increase in both holidays,” she said. “It’s kind of scary.”
California was the first state to impose a blockade in the spring, and for a time it seemed to handle the pandemic much better than other places. But in facing the long-feared crisis, the pain is spreading unevenly.
In southern Los Angeles, where the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital serves low-income communities inhabited by clerks and bus drivers who live in crowded houses and are forced to live with the public every day, infection rates are very high. higher. In Los Angeles County, about 15% of coronavirus tests in the past few days are positive; at a test site on the hospital campus, the rate is around 25%.
As a result, the burden of the sudden increase is much heavier in that hospital than in the wealthier areas of Los Angeles. According to recent statistics, 66 percent of the hospital’s capacity was occupied by Covid-19 patients – making it, in fact, the epicenter of the epicenter. Across the city, on the whiter and richer West Side, 11% of the bed capacity at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center was packed with coronavirus patients.
Staff at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, where most patients receive Medicaid or are uninsured, say they are struggling to transfer patients to larger hospitals when they need a high level of care, such as neurosurgery or cardiac procedures.
“What we see is a significant difference between patients with commercial insurance and Medicaid,” said Dr. Elaine Batchlor, the hospital’s chief executive. “Those with commercial insurance leave faster.”
She added: “We have talked a lot about systemic racism and social justice and everyone says they want to do something about it, but our health care system is a big reflection of something separate and unequal. And the Covid pandemic is highlighting the same patterns. “
Mrs. Thompson, who has been working from 7 am to midnight for a few days, thanked her for her Christmas day off and planned to spend it with her four children. Her parents, who live nearby, but with whom she did not live during the pandemic, were at Zoom.
But the holiday was just a brief truce, and she is scheduled to work on New Year’s, delivering an endless wave in sight.
“Trying to work all those overtime hours and then trying to keep up with all the deaths and deaths and trying to keep a straight face and move on, is exhausting,” she said.