LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Strict home orders were renewed indefinitely on Tuesday for much of California, a major US point of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the state’s top health official said many hospitals is agitated by the crisis.
Tough restrictions on social and economic life earlier this month were extended to southern California, with a dense population – home to more than half of the state’s 40 million people – based on data showing intensive care units there. likely to remain filled at or near capacity weeks to come.
Home stay orders, among the strictest in the United States, are also renewed in the agricultural heart of the San Joaquin Valley, whose hospital ICU has also remained 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.
At least 90 percent of the county’s hospitals, he said, were stretched so thin by the influx of patients with COVID-19 that they were forced to redirect patients receiving emergency care to other facilities for much of the day last weekend.
No hospital has yet officially notified public health authorities that they have reached the point of operating on a “crisis care” basis, involving the wholesale rationing of medical treatment and supplies for the sickest patients, Ghaly said.
However, he added, “some hospitals in Southern California have implemented some practices that would be part of crisis care,” such as weighing the effectiveness of certain treatments for certain patients who are unlikely to survive or recover. he is doing well ”.
Ghaly said he did not know of any case so drastic as to force doctors to choose, for example, between two patients who needed to be placed on a ventilator when only one was available. He said, however, that hospital managers are doing their best to prepare for deteriorating conditions, to avoid such dire scenarios.
“I could see the worst thing 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 just that.”
The gloomy projections are based on expectations that many individuals will continue, as they have done, not to heed public health warnings and mandates to avoid congestion and unnecessary travel for the rest of the winter holidays, further fueling increases in coronavirus transmissions.
The authorities want to prevent the state’s health system from shrinking as much as possible, until the newly approved COVID-19 vaccines can be made available to the public on a large scale in the spring.
Residents under home residence orders are required for the time being to remain largely indoors and avoid travel, unless required for permitted activities such as grocery shopping, medical meetings, individual outdoor exercises, and dog walks.
Constraints have also been imposed on a number of commercial activities, with restaurants being limited to pick-up and drop-off services and bars completely closed.
Orders can be lifted once projections show that the available ICU capacity of a region will reach at least 15%.
The San Francisco Bay Area and the greater Sacramento area are under the same restrictions, with ICU capacities at about 10% and 19%, respectively. Each comes at the first three-week review early next month.
Report by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; edited by Grant McCool