Daily coronavirus case counts in California remain around four times what they were during the state’s summer peak, and authorities predict that the side effects of a December holiday-related increase will worsen over the winter.
After new infections – caused by trips and meetings on Thanksgiving Day, then Christmas festivities – resulted in an increase unlike anything the state had ever seen, the trajectory of their new cases stabilized somewhat in the early days 2021.
But there are more than twice as many Covid-19 patients in California hospitals now as there was a month ago, and many intensive care units in the state are full. At least six people in the state have also been infected with the new, more transmissible variant of the virus first identified in Britain.
The state also faces a shortage of oxygen for patients and has deployed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the California Emergency Medical Services Authority to help deliver and refill oxygen tanks.
In a sign of how dire this shortage is, Marianne Gausche-Hill, medical director of the Los Angeles County EMS agency, issued guidelines for emergency workers on Sunday to administer the “minimum amount of oxygen needed” to maintain the level of oxygen saturation of patients at or just above 90 percent. (A level below 90 or below is a concern for people with Covid-19.)
In the brutal logic of the pandemic, more cases inevitably translate into more suffering and death. On Monday night, 4,258 people with Covid-19 died in the previous two weeks, compared with 3,043 in the previous two weeks.
“This is a deadly disease, this is a deadly pandemic,” Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters on Monday. “It remains more deadly today than at any time in the history of the pandemic.”
There has been some progress. California’s daily average of 38,086 cases per day last week represents an 11 percent decrease from the two-week average, for example. And while Covid-19 hospitalizations have increased 18% in the past two weeks to 20,618, Governor Newsom said that this represents a slight flattening of the curve.
But the last major Covid-19 outbreak in the state, during the summer, produced only about 10,000 infections in the worst days. And in Los Angeles County, the latest crisis has overwhelmed the health care system so much that patients arriving at a hospital have recently been instructed to wait in an outdoor tent.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said on Sunday that the county’s latest outbreak was infecting a new person every six seconds, and that many transmissions occurred in private settings.
“It is a message for the whole of America: we may not all have the same density as LA, but what is happening in LA can and will be happening in many communities in America,” he said.
The state’s worst outbreak is concentrated in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, where intensive care units are at zero percent capacity. The authorities are now working to bring in an extra nursing team to take care of the flood of patients; Governor Newsom said 90 patients were being kept in “alternative treatment facilities” outside hospitals to help ease the burden.
More vaccines would help ease California’s burden, but Governor Newsom said vaccinations were only increasing after facing some initial challenges. So far, he said, the state has administered only about 35% of the doses of the coronavirus vaccine it has received.
“This is not good enough,” he said. “We recognize that.”
In the meantime, said Dr. Mark Ghaly, state secretary for health and human services, Californians should be more cautious when meeting with people outside the home, now that the virus is so prevalent.
“The same activities that you did a month ago, today are much more risky than they were from a Covid broadcast perspective,” he said.