The uninterrupted increase in coronavirus cases is likely to result in prolonged home requests for southern California and other areas, as intensive care beds remain dangerously scarce.
The closest date that Southern California could have become eligible to withdraw from the existing order was Monday, but state officials said Sunday that the region and several other areas would likely have to continue following restrictions for a few more weeks. , as the recent increase is taking hospitals to the breaking point.
Restrictions include reduced capacity in retail stores; the closing of some businesses, including hairdressers, manicures, card games, museums, zoos and aquariums; and the ban on most meetings, hotel stays for tourism and dinner in open-air restaurants.
Hospitalization requests will remain in effect until the ICU’s projected capacity for the region is equal to or greater than 15%, as per state guidance. In the Southern California and San Joaquin Valley regions – which together cover 23 of California’s 58 counties – the current available ICU capacity is 0%.
This does not mean that there are no unoccupied ICU beds, as the state ensures that some remain open to patients who do not have COVID-19. But officials and experts warn that an overcrowded ICU can overwhelm doctors and nurses, jeopardizing the quality of care for everyone, including COVID-19 patients, victims of heart attacks and those who were seriously injured in a car accident.
“The Regional Home Order is likely to extend to many regions of California,” the California Department of Public Health said in a statement on Sunday. When a county reaches the 15% ICU bed availability limit or more, it must maintain that status for four weeks.
The likely extension is not surprising. Governor Gavin Newsom predicted this on December 21: “It is very likely, based on current trends, that we will need to extend this order to stay home,” he said during a briefing.
The state secretary of public health reported that the state has 2,122,806 confirmed cases to date, with more than 24,000 deaths. There were more than 50,000 new confirmed cases registered on Saturday.
On Sunday, Los Angeles County health officials reported more than 42,000 new cases of coronavirus on Christmas Day and Saturday together. Friday’s numbers – 15,538 cases – were delayed due to an outage of Spectrum internet service in the Los Angeles area. The county averaged about 13,800 new cases of coronavirus a day and 88 deaths from COVID-19 a day last week.
Orange County officials reported 3,200 cases on Sunday and one death.
Hospitals across the region are overburdened. Some have a dangerously low oxygen supply, critical for the treatment of critically ill patients with COVID-19 who have started to suffocate because of their virus-inflamed lungs. Emergency rooms are so overcrowded that ambulances have to wait up to eight hours to drop off patients or are sometimes sent to more distant hospitals.
“Our hospitals are already full, and the high-quality medical care we are used to in LA County is starting to get compromised because our frontline health professionals are over the limit,” said the director of public health at county, Barbara Ferrer, during a briefing last week.
In one scenario, experts predict that there may be a jump in new coronavirus cases in mid-January, an increase in hospitalizations in late January and early February, and another increase in deaths in early mid-February.
The rapid succession of holidays in the fall and winter months allows people to celebrate and spend time with their loved ones in a short time.
But that leaves little time for coronavirus cases to start falling before they increase again.
Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said that a person exposed to COVID-19 at a Christmas party could be infected on New Year’s Eve.
However, the individual may be asymptomatic, go to a New Year’s Eve party and without knowing how to spread the disease, he said. Coupled with a high infection rate – about 1 in 95 in Los Angeles County are contagious with the virus, according to county estimates – the holidays are creating a “viral fire,” he said.
Times staff writer Joe Mozingo contributed to this report.