LOS ANGELES (AP) – Ambulances waited hours for openings to discharge coronavirus patients. Overflow patients were transferred to hospital corridors and gift shops, even a cafeteria. Refrigerated trucks were on standby, ready to store the dead.
For months, California has been doing many of the right things to prevent a catastrophic wave of the pandemic. But by the time Governor Gavin Newsom said on Dec. 15 that 5,000 body bags were being distributed, it was clear that the country’s most populous state had entered a new phase of the COVID-19 crisis.
Now infections have been spiraling out of control for weeks, and California has routinely set new records of infections and deaths. It remains at or near the top of the list of states with the most new cases per capita.
Experts say a variety of factors combined to reverse past efforts, keeping the virus manageable for much of the year. Cramped housing, travel and Thanksgiving gatherings contributed to the spread, along with public fatigue amid regulations that shut down many schools and businesses and encouraged – or required – an isolated lifestyle.
Another factor could be a more contagious variant of the virus detected in Southern California, although it’s not yet clear how widespread that might be.
The calamity of California has helped fuel the spike in US infection at the end of the year and added urgency in efforts to combat the plague that killed more than 340,000 Americans. Even as vaccines become available, cases will almost certainly continue to grow, with another rise expected in the weeks after Christmas and New Year.
The southern half of the state has suffered the worst, from the agricultural San Joaquin Valley to the border with Mexico. Hospitals are inundated with patients and intensive care units no longer have beds for COVID-19 patients. Improvised departments are set up in tents, arenas, classrooms and conference rooms.
Statewide hospital admissions have increased more than eightfold in two months and have increased nearly tenfold in Los Angeles County. On Thursday, the total number of deaths in California surpassed 25,000, with only New York and Texas joining that milestone.
“Most heartbreakingly, if we could have better reduced the transmission of the virus, many of these deaths would not have happened,” said Barbara Ferrer, the province’s director of public health, who has begged people not to get together and to worsen. the spread.
Overcrowded houses and apartments are often cited as a source of dispersion, especially in Los Angeles, which has some of the densest neighborhoods in the US. Households in and around LA often have multiple generations – or multiple families – under one roof. Those are usually lower-income areas where residents have essential jobs that could expose them to the virus at work or while commuting.
The socioeconomic situation in LA County is “like kindling,” said Paula Cannon, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Southern California. “And now we’ve gotten to the point where there was enough COVID in the community to start the fire.”
Home to a quarter of the state’s 40 million residents, LA County has known 40% of the state’s deaths and a third of its 2.2 million cases. The virus has hit Latino and Black communities harder.
Cannon said there is a moral obligation on people who can follow house arrest to help prevent spread that is more difficult to control in other areas.
“What you can’t do is tell people, ‘Can you stop living in a house with eight other people, five of whom have essential work jobs?’” She said. “This is the structure that we cannot change in LA. This, I think, adds to the reason why our levels have suddenly become terrifyingly high and it looks like they are going to keep rising and staying that way. “
In March, during the early days of the pandemic, Newsom was praised for issuing the first house arrest.
The Democrat relaxed business restrictions in May, and when a wider reboot sparked another wave, he imposed more rules. In early December, when things got out of hand, he issued a looser order to stay home. He also closed businesses such as barber shops and salons, shut down restaurants and limited capacity in stores. The latest restrictions apply everywhere except rural Northern California.
But Dr. Lee Riley, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California at Berkeley, said that while the state did manage to flatten the curve of rising cases, it never effectively bent the curve down to the point where infections would die out.
When the cases occurred in June and July, California was never able to track down enough contacts to isolate infected people and those they may have exposed to before spreading the disease – often unknowingly – to others, he said. And public health guidelines were never sufficiently enforced.
“Maybe what California did was slow the peak,” Riley said. Infections “have never actually gotten low enough. And we started to lift the restrictions, and so the transmissions could just keep increasing. We have never really seen a real decline. “
California health secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly, said that if state and local leaders hadn’t made tough decisions early on that saved lives, the current wave may not be the worst the state has seen.
He recognized the exhaustion many people feel after months of dislocation in their lives. Public health officials, he said, must find a way to reach out to people who have given up or have not followed the rules of social detachment and masks.
Across California, local officials have reminded people that the fate of the virus lies in their behavior and asked for another round of shared sacrifice. They reminded people that activities that were safe earlier this year are now risky as the virus becomes more widespread.
“You can practice safety and low-risk behavior from March to October. But that has all been erased. Nothing matters except what you do now to fight the virus, ”said Corinne McDaniels-Davidson, director of the Institute for Public Health at San Diego State University. “This pandemic is an ultramarathon. In our culture we are used to sprints. ”
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Associated Press Writer Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.