The State Department of Public Health said on Friday that more than 47,000 new confirmed cases had been reported, bringing the total to more than 2.29 million.
State hospitals have ended the year “on the brink of disaster,” a health official said, as the pandemic pushed deaths and diseases to staggering levels, and some medical centers rushed to provide oxygen for the seriously ill. .
RELATED: once a model, California is now struggling to tame COVID-19
Governor Gavin Newsom’s office announced Friday that California will begin working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to evaluate and upgrade outdated oxygen delivery systems at six hospitals in Los Angeles.
The collaboration comes as older hospitals have difficulty maintaining oxygen pressure in aging infrastructure, and some are struggling to locate additional oxygen tanks for outpatients to take home.
This week, California became the third state to exceed 25,000 COVID-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.
ICU bed capacity in Southern California remains at 0%.
“In the ICU, we are out of capacity. We are creating spaces out of nowhere,” said Olena Svetlov, MSN, RN at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
The rest of the state is not doing much better. The San Joaquin Valley is also at 0% ICU availability. The Bay Area is at 6% and Sacramento is at 11%.
Los Angeles County reported more than 20,000 new cases on Friday and more than 200 deaths.
LA County officials reported one death every 10 minutes, asking people on social media to stay home and stay safe.
But many ignored those pleas on New Year’s Eve, with a series of public gatherings in Southern California.
ABOUT: Kirk Cameron hosts New Year’s Eve meeting at Point Mugu, despite warnings from public health officials
On Friday, the sheriff’s department of LA County announced its “super-spread” working group, making 90 arrests in five separate locations last night.
Actor Kirk Cameron hosted another unmasked meeting on Thursday, with groups of people seen on the beach at Point Mugu for a faith-based event.
It was a similar scene in Valencia, where hundreds packed a parking lot to ring in the new year. Few who attended the open-air concert hosted by Christian activist Sean Feucht at Higher Vision Church wore masks or were physically distant.
Car enthusiasts gathered in Pasadena for their annual New Year’s Eve Rose Parade cruise, even though the world-famous show was canceled.
“It’s hard not to make these correlations between those holidays and the peak we see shortly after them,” Shane Reichardt told the Riverside County Office of Emergency Management.
Meanwhile, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States exceeded 20 million on Friday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
CONNECTION: US reaches 20 million in COVID-19 cases
It is almost twice as much as country no. 2, India, and nearly a quarter of the more than 83 million cases globally.
The United States continued to outperform other countries in COVID-19 cases, reaching 20 million at the start of the new year, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The deaths caused by COVID-19 have increased in the country, now totaling over 346,000.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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