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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/us/southern-california-hospitals-covid.html
Southern California’s Hospitals Are Overwhelmed
Inside the hospital, so many patients are streaming in that gurneys have been placed in the gift shop, and the entire lobby is now a space to treat patients. The waiting room is a tent outside.
“Everything is backed up all the way to the street,” said Dr. Oscar Casillas, the medical director of the hospital’s emergency department, which is set up to serve about 30 people at a time but over the last week has seen more than 100 patients per day.
In the High Desert region northeast of Los Angeles, health care workers at one hospital are getting their first shots of a coronavirus vaccine in a cheerful conference room decked out in holiday decorations. There is Christmas music, and “Home Alone 2” playing on a screen. Yet as soon as the needle is out of their arms, there is the next “code blue,” or the next FaceTime goodbye to arrange between a dying patient and a grieving family...
Each day in California, which this week became the first state to reach two million recorded virus cases, brings a mind-numbing new accounting of the tragedy underway — more cases, more sickness, more death. Southern California, the most populous area of the most populous state, is on the edge of catastrophe. In Los Angeles County, a vast region whose population is roughly the size of Michigan’s, there are roughly 6,500 people hospitalized with Covid-19, a fourfold increase over the last month. The number of patients in intensive care units is close to 1,300, double what it was a month ago...
But the availability of beds is not even the most urgent concern. With so many employees falling sick or taking leave after months of treating coronavirus patients, hospitals are struggling to find enough workers.
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Los Angeles County has been so overwhelmed it is running out of oxygen, with ambulance crews instructed to use oxygen only for their worst-case patients. Crews were told not bring patients to the hospital if they have little hope of survival and to treat and declare such patients dead on the scene to preserve hospital capacity. Several Los Angeles hospitals have turned away ambulance traffic in recent days because they can’t provide the air flow needed to treat patients.
Arizona now has the nation’s highest rate of coronavirus hospitalizations. In the Atlanta area, nearly every major hospital is almost full, prompting state officials to reopen a field hospital for the third time.
The optimism that came with new vaccines and a new year is colliding with a grim reality: The United States has reached the worst stage of the pandemic to date, with the deadly results of holiday gatherings yet to arrive. Vaccine distribution is also off to a slow start, with at least 4.6 million inoculated, far short of the 20 million the Trump administration vowed to vaccinate by the end of 2020.
“We have so many crises happening simultaneously on multiple fronts,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist with George Mason University. “And all signs point to things getting a whole lot worse before they get better.”
