An emergency room crew waits with a patient outside the Coast Plaza Hospital emergency room during a spate of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in Los Angeles, California, December 26, 2020.
David Swanson | Reuters
The Covid-19 outbreak is so bad in Los Angeles County that ambulances have to wait hours to drop patients off in emergency rooms.
Hospital beds are crammed into gift shops, cafeterias, and conference rooms as hospitals struggle to find available space for patients.
The Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency told EMS workers on Monday to only administer supplemental oxygen when a patient’s saturation levels drop below 90% to maintain depleted oxygen supplies. Paramedics were also told not to transport adult heart attack patients to the hospital unless they can restore “spontaneous circulation” to the scene – to focus care on patients more likely to survive.
Los Angeles is facing an unprecedented surge in the number of coronavirus patients pushing the region’s hospitals to the brink. Public health officials warn that the already dire situation is expected to worsen in January.
“Many hospitals have reached a point of crisis and are facing very difficult decisions about patient care,” said Dr. Christina Ghaly, the county’s director of health services, at a news conference on Monday. She urged residents to avoid the emergency room unless they need serious medical attention.
Hospitals have been stretched to their limits since Decemer, when intensive care capacity in the region quickly dropped to zero, according to state health officials. More than 8,000 people are now hospitalized with the virus in the county, and 20% of those people are in intensive care units, data collected by the county public health department shows. With the virus spread widely, public health officials are warning that conditions are likely to worsen before they improve.
Medical responders (EMTs) and health professionals are treating patients outside of the emergency room at Community Hospital of Huntington Park during an increase in cases of positive coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Huntington Park, California, December 29, 2020.
Bing Guan | Reuters
Across California, about 370 people die from Covid-19 every day, on a weekly average – an increase of nearly 46% from a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of data collected by Johns Hopkins University.
In Los Angeles County, the coronavirus kills someone every 15 minutes on average, Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said during Monday’s briefing. The county surpassed 11,000 total Covid-19 deaths Tuesday, 1,000 of which came in within a week, the public health department said in a statement.
Everyone in the area should assume they will be exposed to the disease when they leave their home, Ferrer said. One in five people tested for Covid-19 in Los Angeles County has the virus.
“We will probably experience the worst conditions in which we have experienced the entire pandemic in January, and it is hard to imagine,” Ferrer said. “The increase in cases is likely to continue for weeks as a result of holiday and New Year’s Eve celebrations and returning travelers.”
The staff were thin
Los Angeles County is still dealing with the Covid-19 flood due to the Thanksgiving holiday and has yet to see the cases likely to follow the late December holiday, Ghaly said. Hospitals are now trying “to do everything they can to prepare”.
Some coronavirus patients are forced to wait more than a day before an intensive care unit bed opens for them, Dr. Brad Spellberg, the chief medical officer at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center, in an email to CNBC. .
A health professional checks patients in an oxygen tent outside the emergency room at the Community Hospital of Huntington Park during an increase in positive coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in Huntington Park, California, December 29, 2020.
Bing Guan | Reuters
The hospital has had to rearrange some of its healthcare providers to handle the influx of ICU patients, meaning there is no time to perform elective surgery or other life-saving procedures, such as colonoscopies, Spellberg said.
Gavin Newsom said at a news conference Monday that the state has sent medical assistance teams to Los Angeles to help reduce stress on hospitals, but if there is another spate of Covid-19 cases after the December vacation, the additional staff needs to be will not be enough, said Spellberg.
“Our staff is still skinny, especially in the ICU. You can’t just create more ICU nurses and doctors,” Spellberg said in an email asking people to continue to follow public health guidelines, such as wearing a mask, take physical distance and avoid crowds.
‘We are being crushed’
The wave comes as California, along with other states in the US, has begun to administer their first injections of Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
The state has received just over 2 million doses of vaccines, but only 24% of them have been administered, according to the state’s Department of Health database last updated Wednesday. Newsom said on Monday that the process is being slow and the state “wants things to go much faster.”
Ravina Kullar, a Los Angeles-based infectious disease expert and member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told CNBC in a phone interview that she expects vaccinations to speed up in the coming weeks, although the shots won’t work right away. Immunity takes a few weeks to build up, and too little is given to develop herd immunity that would protect the wider population.
“I think we’ll see some sort of stability, flattening and diminishing in cases, but it will just take time,” said Kullar. “I think it will take until spring, summer, to really see an impact there.”
Kullar, who works in long-term care and nursing homes in Los Angeles, said every facility she works with is fighting a Covid-19 outbreak. Those residents, in addition to health workers, will be first in line to receive vaccination shots in California as they roll out, Newsom said, adding that there are about 3 million people in the state’s initial phase of vaccination.
“We’re being crushed,” said Kullar. “We have very few staff. I am exhausted, my colleagues are exhausted. It’s a very difficult situation here.”
– The Associated Press contributed to this report.