LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Strict home orders renewed indefinitely on Tuesday in much of California, one of the main U.S. hotspots for the COVID-19 pandemic, as the state’s top health official to say that many hospitals were on the brink of crisis.
Severe restrictions imposed earlier this month on social and economic life widened in densely populated southern California, home to more than half of the state’s 40 million people, according to data showing intensive care units. which will probably stay full or close for weeks. Come.
Home stay orders, among the strictest in the United States, are also being renewed at the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Center, whose ICUs have been maintained for weeks with little or no bed space.
California Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly said Los Angeles County, the most populous county, has been particularly hard hit by weeks of growing infections and hospitalizations.
He said at least 90 percent of the county’s hospitals have been so thin from the influx of COVID-19 patients that they were forced to divert incoming emergency patients to other facilities for much of the day during the head. from last week.
No hospital has formally communicated to public health authorities that they have reached the point of operating on the basis of “crisis care,” which involves wholesale rationing of medical treatment and supplies to the sickest patients, Ghaly said.
However, he added, “some hospitals in Southern California have established some practices that would be part of crisis care,” such as weighing “the effectiveness of certain treatments for certain patients that are unlikely to survive.” or that they do it well “.
Ghaly said he knew of no such drastic case that would force doctors to choose, for example, between two patients who needed to put on a ventilator when only one was available. But he said hospital managers were doing their best to prepare for deteriorating conditions to avoid such dire scenarios.
“We could see the worst in early January,” he told reporters in an online briefing. “And most of the hospital leaders I’ve talked to in Southern California are preparing for exactly that.”
The bleak projections are based on expectations that many people will continue, as they do, ignoring warnings and public health mandates to avoid unnecessary congestion and travel during the rest of the winter holidays, which will fuel other peaks in transmissions of coronavirus.
Authorities want to prevent the state’s health care system from shrinking as much as possible until the recently approved COVID-19 vaccines become widely available to the public in the spring.
Residents who have orders to stay at home, for the time being, should largely stay indoors and avoid travel, except when necessary for permitted activities, such as grocery shopping, medical appointments, individual exercise at home. outdoors and dog walks.
Restrictions have also been imposed on a large number of commercial activities, with restaurants limited to pick-up and drop-off service and closed bars.
Orders can be withdrawn once projections show that the available ICU capacity of a region will reach at least 15%.
The San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Sacramento are under the same restrictions, with ICU capacities hovering around 10% and 19%, respectively. Each presents their first three-week review early next month.
Report by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; edition by Grant McCool