The dreaded post-Christmas increase in coronavirus cases appears to be materializing in Los Angeles County, with a further increase in cases, as hospitals are already in crisis with the Thanksgiving surge.
The county reported 19,063 cases on New Year’s Day, the third highest total on a single day, and 16,603 on Saturday, the fifth highest total, according to an Times independent count of local health jurisdictions. This means that in the past three days, an average of more than 16,000 new cases per day have been reported in the county – one of the highest counts ever recorded.
Saturday’s count pushed the county’s cumulative number of cases over 800,000. In a sign of how the coronavirus is spreading rapidly, more than 400,000 of these infections have been reported since December 1.
“This is the fastest acceleration of new cases at any time during the pandemic,” said the LA County Department of Public Health.
More LA County residents die daily from COVID-19 than anywhere else in the pandemic – an average of 178 deaths per day in the past week, equivalent to one death every eight minutes, according to a Times analysis. Of the cumulative number of deaths in LA County of more than 10,600, more than 3,000 have been reported since December 1, including 136 on Saturday.
With hospitals already full, officials fear another increase in cases, which experts say would worsen conditions by January.
Just a week ago, there were some encouraging signs that new cases in the county were slowly stabilizing – stabilizing at around 13,000 to 14,000 a day – as the order to stay at home began to pay off. But this brought little celebration, because those numbers were still so high that they would continue to overwhelm hospitals and because health officials were convinced that meetings over the Christmas holiday would quickly erase those gains.
Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said on Saturday that he expects cases to increase in the next two weeks as people exposed to the virus at Christmas and New Year Novo get sick and get tested. This would be similar to Thanksgiving trends.
If these trends continue, hospitals are expected to reach their peak crisis by the end of January and deaths from COVID-19 will peak in mid-February, he said.
“Given that people, with luck, will travel less and have fewer meetings in their homes after these recent consecutive holiday celebrations … we should begin to see some declines in disease rates by the end of January,” Kim-Farley said.
The number of daily cases in late winter is also expected to begin to decline because many people who end up surviving coronavirus infection will develop immunity, said Kim-Farley.
This level of protection will not result in total “herd immunity” that protects the entire population, but “it should result in a decrease in the number of new cases in those who are not following public health guidelines on masking and physical distance”, Kim-Farley said.
Only when 70% to 85% of the population has received the vaccine, which Kim-Farley estimates will occur in early summer, “the herd’s true immunity will begin to be reflected in a faster drop in the number of new cases in the population”, said Kim-Farley. “In late summer or early autumn, we should be able to return to an appearance of our life in the pre-COVID era with very limited restrictions on our activities, businesses and schools.”
And, as more elderly people and people in nursing homes are vaccinated, “we should see some declines in hospitalizations and deaths because residents in nursing homes represent a much higher percentage … of all deaths due to COVID,” he said. Kim-Farley. But there may be a delay in seeing a big drop in new daily cases, “since many younger people are getting the disease”.
Authorities asked more people to stay home during winter holidays than during Thanksgiving, and there was hope that more people would agree. The Rose Parade was canceled for the first time since 1945 and Pasadena was in a scary calm.
But the same type of pandemic fatigue seen on Thanksgiving Day has led many people to challenge the authorities’ calls to stay home during the winter holidays. Many airports have recorded steady traffic of holiday travelers. And thousands of New Year’s revelers were dispersed, detained or imprisoned over the weekend in Southern California, as large celebrations and parties took place across the region.
Los Angeles Police Department officials said they had interrupted at least eight New Year’s Eve meetings involving more than 2,000 people in and around the center, including a party at a warehouse where more than 1,000 people were dispersed. The sheriff’s officials said they had separated at least five parties involving more than 900 people – including a rented house, an empty warehouse, a hotel and a closed business.
Lieutenant Raul Jovel, a LAPD spokesman, said LAPD officials were “all monitoring social media” this week to identify planned parties. The job was not easy, in part because the party’s hosts “are getting smarter,” he said. Prosecutors usually announce a party in a general area – such as the city center – but do not publish the address until the last minute or do not post, relying on word of mouth.
Social media “influencers” and other young partygoers posted pictures on social networks of revelers celebrating the old-fashioned New Year – shouting, dancing and singing together in enclosed spaces without masks.
On New Year’s Eve, Christian activist Sean Feucht attracted some 2,500 attendants, mostly without a mask, to a church parking lot in Valencia.
Actor Kirk Cameron and others gathered at Point Mugu Beach. “We need to hear the voice of God, instead of being distracted by the noise of men,” said Cameron in a video posted on his Instagram page, which showed a crowd shouting and clapping in response to his sermon. Most people did not wear masks.
With hospitals facing a state crisis never seen in modern history, the stay-at-home order is expected to remain in effect in most parts of the state for the foreseeable future. State officials say the order will remain in effect until the expected available capacity of intensive care units increases to 15% in one region; remains at 0% in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley.
Some Hollywood studios, including CBS Studios, Universal Television, ABC Signature, 20th Television, Warner Bros. Television and Sony Pictures Television also delayed the resumption of production of some winter hiatus TV programs by at least a week. Decisions were made when the LA County Department of Public Health on December 24 encouraged the film industry to pause production for a few weeks due to the increase in COVID-19 deaths.
Despite the bleak outlook for the coming weeks, Kim-Farley said: “I have no doubt that if we were not ordered to stay at home, the situation would be much more dire than it is now. However, I think the magnitude of the numbers shows that, in the face of the order to stay at home, many people are choosing to ignore it and, without strong supervision, this mixture of families and parties continues to occur. “
Hospitals across LA County are being hit by the pandemic, with most forced to refuse ambulances for much of the day, while medical institutions give in to the burden of unprecedented intensive care demand. The morgues of hospitals and private funeral homes are so full of corpses that the National Guard was asked to help store the bodies temporarily in the county coroner’s office. And healthcare professionals are dying from COVID-19 at a faster rate.
As one of the largest cities in the country, with some of the densest neighborhoods in the country, LA County is considered particularly vulnerable to a pandemic. The county, which is home to more than 10 million people, suffers in several neighborhoods with high poverty rates and expensive housing that lead to overcrowded homes. Southern California also has a large number of essential workers who have to leave their homes to work – many employed in food factories and warehouses – where the virus can also spread easily.
Some patients spend up to nine hours in hospital waiting rooms with low blood pressure and low oxygen levels. A number of facilities are reporting that oxygen supplies are dangerously low. Some patients transported by ambulances wait up to eight hours to be returned to the emergency room. There is a fear that people who suffer strokes, heart attacks and seizures are not getting the quick attention they need, and at least one person who was waiting for a kidney transplant had his procedure postponed because the ICUs are overcrowded.
With so many patients with COVID-19 suffering from inflamed lungs that make them short of breath, some aging hospital systems have been unable to meet the demand for high oxygen flow rates. The United States Army Corps of Engineers is planning to send teams to the region to update oxygen delivery systems in some hospitals.
Times staff writers Cindy Carcamo, Marisa Gerber, Wendy Lee and Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.