R&I – FS
In the coming days, Los Angeles County will reach a level where one in 10 residents has tested positive for the coronavirus.
LOS ANGELES — A sustained surge of coronavirus infections has locked Southern California in crisis, overwhelming intensive care wards, ambulance services, funeral homes and local officials.
Dozens of overcrowded hospitals have had to shut their emergency-room doors to ambulances for hours at a time. Medical wards are running dangerously low on a vital necessity: oxygen, and the portable canisters to supply it to patients. Los Angeles County has a coronavirus-related death every eight minutes, a grim toll accompanied in many neighborhoods by the soundtrack of shrieking sirens.
“We’re having our New York moment,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health, referring to the weeks in March and April when New York City was the epicenter of the virus.
It took nearly 10 months for Los Angeles County to hit 400,000 cases, but little more than a month to add another 400,000, from Nov. 30 to Jan. 2. In the coming days, the county, the nation’s largest, will reach a level where one in 10 residents has tested positive for the virus.
“In the City of Los Angeles and in our county, Covid-19 is now everywhere and infecting more people than ever,” the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, whose 9-year-old daughter contracted the virus and has since recovered, told reporters on Thursday.
Los Angeles County averaged 187 deaths a day in the seven-day period ending Friday, the most of any American county and double the nation’s per capita rate. The county’s death toll, though awful, is far smaller than the one in New York City in the spring when less was understood about the disease and treatment was not as sophisticated as it is now. At the peak of its crisis in April, New York City averaged around 800 deaths each day.
But there are similarities between the two in the strain on hospitals.
In the April peak, the virus patient count on one day in New York City was more than 12,000. On Friday, there were more than 8,000 people hospitalized with Covid-19 in Los Angeles County, a number that has sharply and quickly climbed. On Nov. 1, hospitalizations were at 799.
California reacted swiftly at the start of the pandemic with the country’s first stay-at-home orders, and had largely avoided the widespread infection and death experienced early on in places like New York. Now many epidemiologists, health officials and elected leaders are trying to understand what went so wrong.
RandyMarsh
Article URL : https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/california-coronavirus.html