LOS ANGELES (AP) – California’s health care system is collapsing under pressure from the largest coronavirus outbreak in the country and could break in weeks if people ignore social distances on vacation, health officials warned as the number of people needing beds and specialized care had previously unimaginable levels.
Top executives of the state’s largest hospital systems – Kaiser Permanente, Dignity Health and Sutter Health, which together cover 15 million Californians – said Tuesday that increasingly exhausted employees, many of whom are hired outside of their normal duties, are now taking care of stacked COVID -19 patients in corridors and conference rooms.
The CEO of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles, Dr. Elaine Batchlor, said separately that patients there defected to the gift shop and five tents outside the emergency department.
“We don’t have room for anyone. We’ve been holding patients for days because we can’t get them transferred, we can’t get them beds, ”said Dr. Alexis Lenz, an emergency room physician at El Centro Regional Medical Center in Imperial County, in the southeast corner. of the state. The facility has set up a 50-bed tent in the parking lot and converted three operating theaters into virus care.
California is approaching 2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19. The state reported nearly 32,700 newly confirmed cases on Tuesday. Another 653 patients were admitted to hospitals – one of the largest jumps in a hospital day – for a total of nearly 18,000.
State data models have predicted that the number of hospital admissions in a month could rise above 100,000 if current rates continue.
Even more worrying than a lack of beds is a lack of staff. The pool of available travel nurses is drying up as demand for them has grown 44% in the past month, with California, Texas, Florida, New York and Minnesota demanding the most additional staff, according to San Diego-based health care provider Aya Healthcare. .
“We are now in a situation where we have spikes all over the country, so no one has many nurses left,” said Dr. Janet Coffman, a professor of public policy at the University of California San Francisco.
California is looking for places like Australia and Taiwan to meet the need for 3,000 temporary medical workers, especially nurses trained in critical care.
Across the country, outbreaks are attributed to a lack of social aloofness and the wearing of masks during Thanksgiving, and officials fear an even bigger wave as people gather for Christmas and New Year.
Fresno County in California’s agricultural Central Valley is in a desperate state. Dr. Thomas Utecht, chief medical officer of Community Medical Centers Fresno, told how medical staff watch sobbing families, desperate patients and people die in isolation wards every day while their loved ones watch from a distance.
Doctors and health officials implore people not to gather outside of their immediate family.
“If people don’t stay at home … we’re going to see something hard to imagine,” said Dr. Patrick Macmillan, a palliative specialist in Fresno County. “I think it will break healthcare.”
Similar warnings have echoed across the country, from Tennessee, where the largest new per capita COVID-19 infection in the country has risen, to Mississippi and West Virginia, which reported their earlier peaks for virus deaths in one day on Tuesday. , exceeded.
The impact of COVID-19 isn’t just on those infected. Lack of beds or nurses means there are also long lines to emergency rooms for other patients, such as patients with a heart attack or trauma, and paramedics who have to wait for an emergency room nurse to take charge of a patient may not be able to immediately answer another 911 call, said Dr. Anneli von Reinhart, an emergency physician at the Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno.
In the middle of the wave, the distribution of thousands of doses of COVID-19 vaccine to health workers does mark light at the end of the tunnel, but “it also feels like the tunnel is getting narrower,” said Dr. Rais Vohra, Interim Health Officer for Fresno County.
“It’s just a race against time to get people through this tunnel as safely as possible,” he said. “That’s exactly what it feels like to be on the front line now.”
___
Thompson reported from Sacramento, California. Associated Press reporters from around the US contributed to this report.